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Environmental devastation under the Bolsonaro
government: unveiling a “myth”
Devastação
ambiental no governo Bolsonaro: desvendando um mito
Carla Alessandra da Silva NUNES
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0205-7778
Federal University of Sergipe, Department
of Social Service, Service Social course,
São Cristóvão, SE, Brazil.
e-mail: carlaalessandranunes@gmail.com
Adriana Carla de Jesus PEREIRA
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https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6442-6612
Federal University of Sergipe,
Department of Social Service, Service Social course,
São Cristóvão, SE, Brazil.
e-mail: adrycarla1210@gmail.com
Abstract: This
article reflects on the Bolsonaro government’s environmental management interventions,
led by a process of deepening bourgeois ideological decadence. Despite the
undeniable devastation of nature and the international consensus regarding the
ideology of sustainable development, the Bolsonaro government made use of an
arsenal of ideas disconnected from this reality, by which it imposed an impossible
fantasy on the order of capital, a country without “environmental
issues”. To unravel this myth, we
present the results of bibliographic and documentary research. We conclude that
the ideological decadence and environmental management under the Bolsonaro
government played an important role in removing obstacles for capital to “drive
a coach and horses through” and advance its process of accumulation, leaving a trail
of destruction, as demonstrated by the increase in deforestation.
Keywords:
Bolsonaro government. The “Environmental issue”. Ideological decadence.
Resumo:
o
artigo objetiva refletir sobre as intervenções do governo Bolsonaro na gestão
ambiental, orientadas por um processo de aprofundamento da decadência
ideológica burguesa. A despeito do movimento do real, da inegável devastação da
natureza e do consenso internacional — em termos da ideologia do
desenvolvimento sustentável —, o governo Bolsonaro se utilizou de um arsenal de
ideias desvinculadas da realidade, por meio do qual impôs a fantasia do
impossível na ordem do capital: um país sem “questão ambiental”. Para desvendar
esse mito, apresentamos os resultados de pesquisa bibliográfica e
documental. Concluímos que a decadência ideológica e a gestão ambiental no
referido governo cumpriram importante papel na liberação de entraves para o
capital passar a boiada e avançar no seu processo de acumulação,
deixando rastros de destruição, como demonstra o aumento do desmatamento.
Palavras-chave:
Governo Bolsonaro. “Questão ambiental”. Decadência ideológica.
1 Introduction
|
A |
mong the various current analyses,
Casimiro (2020) offers a perspective that seeks to understand “[...] the
tragedy and the farce [...]” (Casimiro, 2020, p. 16) of the rise of extreme
right factions in Brazil in 2019. For Casimiro, following Marxist thought, the theatre
that took place in Brazil that year was a real and absolutely
tragic farce, characterised by actions that were a clear offensive
against public education and research institutions, environmental regulations, and
human and labour rights, attacks against indigenous peoples, and a lack of
decorum. In short, a farce that combined the tragic and the comic, but nevertheless
was able to solidify a reactionary project through which progress was made in providing
the reforms demanded by capital in crisis.
This article reflects on some of
the dangers, offensives, and setbacks experienced in Brazil — particularly in
environmental management under the Bolsonaro government — and is supported by
Marxist and Marxian contributions. The factors that make up the anatomy of
capital society allow us to expound the foundations of the “environmental issue”
and the role of ideology in its concealment. As Marx and Engels (2007) warned
us: “[...] If, in every ideology, men and their relations appear upside down as
in a camera obscura, this phenomenon results from their historical life
process, just as the inversion of objects on the retina results from their
immediately physical life process” (Marx; Engels, 2007, p. 94).
The change in the metabolism
between man and nature has a historical and social determination, so it can
only be explained by the relationships established between men in the material
organisation of life, by capitalist social relations, in which the private
appropriation of labour, nature, and the means of production come into conflict
with sustainability. The deepening of the contradictions in contemporary
capitalism and its structural crisis have highlighted the “environmental issue”,
and a field of ideological and political disputes has been created around it. Within
the complex and diverse environmentalist ideology, the ideology of sustainable
development prevails, and this hides the social determinations of capitalist
relations as being the basis of the “environmental issue”. It preaches the
possibility of reconciling the capitalist market and nature, even when the
movement of real life shows the contrary. The concealment of capitalist
contradictions by bourgeois apologetics and the disregard for reality to
guarantee the preservation of the capitalist social order were translated into
ideas that Marx and Engels (2007) called deliberate hypocrisy and Lukács
called (1968) ideological decadence. It is our understanding that the
guiding ideas of environmental management produced under the Bolsonaro
government are developments of this process and, as Iasi (2020) suggests, an
aggravation of ideological decadence.
Chosen as a myth by which to govern Brazil from
2019 to 2022, Bolsonaro led actions that accelerated and deepened regressive
processes typical of capitalism in crisis, and
strengthened the widespread conservatism and reactionism in Brazilian society.
The regression of democratic achievements, including the right-of-all to a
balanced environment, was underpinned by the denial of scientific advances —
with particular disregard for research and studies
demonstrating the existence of the “environmental issue”[1] — and by the criminalisation of
collective actors and those demanding social and environmental rights.
Our understanding
is that it is not possible to reconcile capitalism with socially and
environmentally sustainable development, given that the contradictions of
capitalist production and reproduction tend to increase social inequality and
the destruction of nature (Mészáros, 2011). The Bolsonaro government’s
environmental dismantling project was a political and programmatic retreat from
the adherence to proposals to confront the “environmental issue”, even those engraved
on the surface of the ideology of sustainable development, an ideology established
by the bourgeois order itself.
In view of this, we state that under
the Bolsonaro administration there was a farce in which the “environmental
issue” became one of the targets of ideological decadence as a form of
consciousness (Iasi, 2020). This decadence was expressed in bizarre attempts to
create a “mythology” around the environmental issue, treating it as a
Marxist climate conspiracy, “climatism”, or climate alarmism, to make people
believe that the “environmental issue” was a phantom against which, in order to counter it, necessitated the denial the demands for
social and environmental sustainability.
Earlier, as a member of parliament,
Bolsonaro has positioned himself against actions to preserve the environment,
mocked environmental movements, and aligned himself with highly polluting
economic sectors. As president, he delivered speeches that presented Brazil as
having resolved the “environmental issue”, a position that is not supported by
reality. For example, the collapse of the dam at the Córrego do Feijão Mine, in
Brumadinho, Minas Gerais (MG), occurred three days after he declared, at the 2019
World Economic Forum in Davos, that “[...] we are the country that best
preserves the environment [...]” (Bolsonaro apud Sudré, 2019, unpaginated).
We employ data from bibliographic
and documentary sources to develop our arguments regarding environmental
management under the Bolsonaro government to offer some elements that
contribute to unravelling the strategy behind this farce, the objective of
which was to obscure the “environmental issue” even when confronted by such
devastating results.
The article has two topics. In the first, we question
the strategy of sustainable development, pointing out its ideological character,
and go on to demonstrate the deepening ideological decline under the Bolsonaro
government, and its attempt to obscure the “environmental issue”. In the
second, we present evidence of unsustainability that continued to occur despite
efforts to cover it up, and we consider some government environmental
management interventions and indications of increased deforestation in Brazil.
We conclude that the ideological decline under the Bolsonaro government led to
regressive practices in environmental management that removed obstacles to
capitalist accumulation and enabled capital to “drive a coach and horses
through”. This requires, on the part of the working class, a critical social
consciousness capable of unveiling the ideologies and myths used to
cover up the “environmental issue”.
2 Ideological decline and
the “environmental issue”: from sustainable development to the climate change
farce
Since the
Brundtland Report was drafted in 1987, the international consensus — established
through pacts, agreements, and commitments between multilateral organisations,
governments, businesspeople, banks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and
social movements — has argued that sustainable development, with goals and
targets to be achieved by 2030 (United Nations, 2015), is the strategy that can
reconcile capitalist expansion with environmental and social sustainability.
Formulated from the perspective of big capital, sustainable development does
not oppose the process of the commodification of nature, limiting itself to
proposing technological and behavioural changes, without altering the social
relations in which the deepest determinations of the “environmental issue” are
found (Silva, 2010).
The “environmental issue” constitutes a social
challenge which is, according to Mészáros (2011), of the highest importance, as
capital ignores the demands of a “[...] socially viable human dominion over the
forces of nature” (Mészáros, 2011, p. 608). One strategy of capital to ensure
its reproduction, is to accelerate the consumption of goods or decrease the turnover
time of capital through disposability, thus institutionalising waste. Mészáros
(2011) also points out that the current crisis of capital has required the
change from productive destruction to destructive production, in which the
costs of environmental degradation are socialised, while most humanity is
denied the basic conditions for survival.
Sustainable development, green capitalism, and
conscious consumption are empty expressions of possibilities, supported by the
preservation of capitalist social relations and the fragile promise that changes
to technology and cultural values will solve environmental problems — a promise that is only convincing due to the power of
concealment, inversion, and the naturalisation of an ideological reality.
Foladori (2001) warned of the limits of this proposal when he stated that:
[...] the aim is to correct the
effects of capitalist production through technical means, that is, by placing
filters here and there, establishing quotas or taxes in other cases, etc.
Without discussing the efficiency of such technical measures at this point, it is clear that none of them affect the capitalist social
form of production. In this sense, these are class-based positions in defence,
obviously, of the capitalist class, owner of the means of production and,
therefore, of the instruments with which it transforms nature into useful
objects and spaces (Foladori, 2001, p. 106).
By denying
class contradictions and the historical and social determinants of the “environmental
issue,” the sustainable development proposal sets out a guiding ideology for
public and private policies, programmes, and actions. The result in more of the
same environmental and social unsustainability, as is evident in a brief visit
to Brazil. By keeping the deepest determinations of this destructiveness hidden,
concentrated in the logic of capitalist accumulation, the ideology of
sustainable development manages to remain intact, as a form of wealth, private
property, the exploitation of labour, and commodity. Through Marx and Engels
(2007), we understand that ideology is a particular form of social
consciousness with the capacity to dominate its producers “[...] as a hostile
and alien force [...]” (Iasi, 2017, p. 93), that is required for the
reproduction of capitalist domination.
Brazil’s active participation in
various international agreements in defence of the environment, such as Rio92
and Rio+20, demonstrated the governments’ commitment to sustainable development
proposals, and its criticisms, in various media outlets, referred more to
dissatisfaction with the limited progress in implementing this strategy.
Among the advances worth mentioning
— fruits of the period of the re-democratisation of Brazil, of the demands of
environmental movements, of the environmentalisation of social struggles, and
of internationally signed pacts and commitments — is the right-of-all to; a
balanced environment, guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution; public management of
the environment through the National Environmental System (Sisnama),
established by the National Environmental Policy (PNMA); and control
instruments such as environmental licensing and the participation of civil
society in conferences and management councils (Mendonça, 2015).
Notwithstanding these advances, Mendonça
(2015) identified in the 2000s, and especially in the last terms of the Lula
(2007-2010) and Dilma (2011-2015) governments, a dangerous attack on the
environmental agenda arising from the neo-developmentalist model, which
revealed itself to be yet another discourse hiding the social-liberal ideology
(Castelo, 2013). The process of deindustrialisation, which began in the 1990s
and continued into the 2000s, deepened the re-primarisation of the economy and
increased production of commodities for export, in which the
agribusiness and mining sectors gained strength, in a “[...] shift of the
production frontier towards products intensive in natural resources [...]”
(Gonçalves, 2011, p. 2), this meant a significant increase in the demand for
land.
Socio-environmental
conflicts have intensified amid a series of public works and interventions
under the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), which required the relaxation of
environmental legislation and the fragmentation and defunding of the implementing
agencies, including the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable
Natural Resources (IBAMA) and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity
Conservation (ICMBIO) (Mendonça, 2015; Marques, 2016). International pacts and
multilateral agreements have also demonstrated a weakening of the environmental
agenda in Brazil, including the non-adherence to “[...] the New York
Declaration on Forests (NYDF), signed by 180 parties worldwide, including
governments, corporations, Indigenous peoples and NGOs” (Marques, 2016, p. 43).
Since the “environmental issue” is a
constituent part of the capitalist mode of production, the State, regardless of
the form of government, cannot be dissociated from this dynamic owing to the
“[...] ontological dependence between economy and politics” (Silva; Santos,
2020, p. 30). Despite the different configurations of a modern bourgeois State,
its essence is irrefutable, and its intervention is increasingly
required during structural crises of capital, resulting in the deepening of the
“environmental issue”. With the advance of the global economic crisis and its
consequences in Brazil, the regressive trend in the environmental agenda has
become more pronounced. The optimistic outlook regarding the neoliberal version
of the State, implemented in the 2000s through the class conciliation pact, was
interrupted by the 2016 coup. With the impeachment of President Dilma Roussef,
what had previously seemed a short “detour” in environmental management took a
profoundly regressive path, particularly with the arrival of Bolsonaro into the
federal executive in 2019. This caused a rapid return to indicators that it had
already surpassed during more than four decades of, albeit limited,
achievements.
But why would a government committed
to the expanded reproduction of capital and the implementation of ultra-liberal
counter-reforms offer resistance, even to a conservative environmental
ideology? We will follow the pathway opened by Iasi (2020) to understand that
the dominant ideas in Brazilian social formation at the time of the rise of the
extreme right, and under the Bolsonaro government, resulted from a worsening of
the ideological decadence that has affected capitalism and its intellectuals,
organic or traditional, since the class struggle first exacerbated their
contradictions. For Iasi, at certain historical moments, the contradictions of
capital unmask the illusionary nature of the dominant ideas:
Marx was convinced that there is a connection between
the dominant ideas and the dominant social relations – or, more precisely, the
relations that make a class the dominant class. The historical movement,
however, moves through contradictions in such a way that the social relations
within which the productive forces developed can become obstacles. At the moment when this happens, a contradiction is
established and the ideas that previously corresponded become inauthentic,
non-corresponding. However, Marx and Engels argue, the more they are
contradicted by life and the less they are worth to one’s own consciousness,
the more resolutely they are affirmed, the more hypocritical, moralistic and
saintly the language of the normal society in question becomes (The German
Ideology, pp. 283–4). The consciousness of this time, in the authors’ words,
thus becomes a conscious illusion, a ‘deliberate hypocrisy’ (Iasi, 2020,
unpaginated, our emphasis).
As a presidential candidate,
Bolsonaro presented an ultra-neoliberal project based on the denial of any
environmental control over the market; the debate seemed to regress to the
times of developmentalist Brazil and the civil-military dictatorship of the
1970s. With this awful period of history in the past, environmental awareness
had advanced significantly. However, attacks on democracy can be repeated as
many times as necessary. Denying environmental issues today, in the name of
market freedom, requires resorting once again to an authoritarianism capable of
blinding inconveniently attentive eyes and silencing voices that denounce the
unsustainability of capitalist development in Brazil. In fact, attachment to
the past haunts us, “[...] the tradition of all dead generations weighs on the
brains of the living like a nightmare” (Marx, 2011, p. 5).
Sustainable development boasts the
appearance of civility. Bolsonaro’s rusticity, his complete rejection of this
ideology, which began during his election campaign, reflects a deepening
ideological decadence that was mobilised to support the interests of the ruling
class. The result of the 2018 elections brought with it the possibility of
rejecting even this bourgeois agenda of a green economy and its
accompanying guidelines and resorting to the unscrupulous defence that
capitalist development can continue without agreements on climate, forest, and biodiversity.
Bolsonaro’s environmental management
achieved as many as possible of his campaign promises: the so-called impassable
barriers to economic enterprise have been systematically attacked. Even before
he was sworn in, he influenced Brazil’s decision to withdraw from hosting the
Climate Summit (COP-25)[2] planned for 2019,
demonstrating his political unwillingness to collaborate in strengthening
collective spaces for environmental management.
The appointment of lawyer Ricardo
Salles[3] to the Ministry of
the Environment (MMA) was essential in conducting environmental management
aimed at “[...] driving a coach and horses through”[4]. The “environmental issue” was
treated as climate ideology, in the words of the former Minister of Foreign
Affairs of the Bolsonaro government:
The environmental cause was launched by Romantic
writers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a conservative movement par
excellence, which emerged in reaction to the emergence of the left in the world
in the form of the French Revolution, whose proposal was to destroy nature –
starting with human nature. Over time, however, the left hijacked the
environmental cause and perverted it until it reached its peak in the last 20
years with the ideology of climate change, “climatism”. “Climatism” gathered some
data that suggested a correlation between rising temperatures and increased CO2
concentration in the atmosphere, ignored data that suggested the opposite, and
created a ‘scientific’ dogma that no one can challenge under penalty of being
excommunicated from good society – exactly the opposite of the scientific
spirit (Araújo, 2018 apud Scantimburgo, 2018, p. 107).
This reading of the situation lacks
historical evidence and expresses an ideological decadence that presents itself
as “[...] an evasion of reality, with an escape in the predominance of ‘pure’
ideology (Lukács, apud Iasi, 2020, unpaginated). As the capitalist mode of
production advanced in expanding the reproduction of capital, as evidenced by
the social processes of the late post-Second World War phase, its
contradictions have grown exponentially. The wealth produced demands increasingly
more from nature and at a faster pace, compromising the response capacity of
ecosystems. In the transition from the 1960s/1970s, these processes emerged
into the social consciousness, giving rise to environmental movements (Silva,
2010).
Within the tangled web of
environmental issues, ideological strategies to neutralise any debate that might
lead to a questioning of the capitalist social order have been gaining ground
and hegemony to prevent the environmental agenda from realising its
anti-capitalist potential. Environmentalism has been captured by market logic,
demonstrating the hollowness of the fanciful idea that the Left had hijacked
the environmental cause.
The Bolsonaro administration
portrayed the country as being the most environmentally friendly. To
ensure this, controls and the silencing of the various collective actors
involved in defending an environmental agenda were imposed. Hence the
dismantling of environmental policy, from implementation to social control, the
contesting of data released by research institutes and environmental monitoring
agencies, and the threats to withdraw the country from international
agreements, showing a lack of commitment to agreed goals, such as the United
Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. To ensure capital had the lead role
in its predatory relationship with nature, a smokescreen was necessary to
obscure the evident environmental damage and justify the dismantling of
environmental management. Below is a selection of the strategies employed by
the Bolsonaro government to accomplish this task.
3 “Where
there’s smoke there’s fire”: devastation under the environmental management of the Bolsonaro government
Restructuring the institutions and
agencies involved in environmental protection was one of the central thrusts of
the Bolsonaro government. Despite the declared desire to abolish the Ministry
of the Environment (MMA), the main agency responsible for implementing
Brazilian environmental policy, and merge it with the Ministry of Agriculture
and Livestock (MAPA), political conditions prevented him from doing so, and the
MMA retained its status as a ministry. He did, however, implement significant
changes to appease the agenda of national and international capital, especially
the fractions of the bourgeoisie linked to agribusiness and mining.
Among the changes to the MMA
structure, we highlight the: 1. transfer of the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB)
and the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), to fall under the responsibility of
the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply (MAPA), also responsible
for the demarcation of indigenous lands; 2. transfer of water resources policy,
including the National Water Agency, to the Ministry of Regional Development; 3.
transfer of the economic agenda on extraction to MAPA; 4. removal of the
climate change theme from the MMA’s responsibilities by abolishing the
Secretariat for Climate Change and Forests; 5. abolishing of the Department of
Environmental Education; 6. abolishing of the Secretariat for Extraction,
Regional Development and Combating Desertification; and 7. the abolishing of
the Secretariat for Institutional Coordination and Environmental Citizenship
(National Association of Environmental Services, 2020).
The offensive against environmental
policy is, therefore, clearly evidenced by the deliberate weakening of the
implementing bodies and the subordination of environmental issues to
agricultural business:
On the list of the responsibilities of the MMA there is a striking
absence of any mention of combating deforestation, which has always been a core
environmental policy. If the government continues to take no action against
environmental crime, as the new government regulations suggest, the
consequences will be irreversible damage to the environment, which the
Constitution defines as the heritage of all society. [...] The dismantling of
socio-environmental policies seems to pretend that these challenges and demands
no longer exist. The new regulations have gone so far as to practically
eliminate references to combating climate change in the structure of the MMA.
The Secretariat for Climate Change and Forests no longer exists. All that
remains is a passing reference to the National Climate Change Fund and its
Management Committee. It is as if the president wanted to end the problem by
omitting references to it (Instituto Socioambiental, 2019, unpaginated).
In terms of social control, there have
been dramatic setbacks to the progress made in democratising public policies post
the 1988 Constitution. Bolsonaro’s intervention led to the vacating or even
closure of the spaces for civil society participation where social control is
exercised, thus impacting environmental policy councils and committees.
Analysts point out that Decree No. 9,759/2019 (Brazil, 2019a), which contains
these revocations, affected around 500 federal bodies. The Brazilian Climate
Change Forum (FBMC), the National Native Vegetation Recovery Plan Commission
(Conaveg), the National Biodiversity Commission (Conabio), and the National
Forestry Commission (Conaflor) are examples of participatory spaces for
environmental control that were abolished.
The decree did not have the legal
force to extinguish collegiate bodies established by law. Faced with this
impasse, Bolsonaro, through Decree No. 9,806/201[5] (Brazil, 2019b),
changed the composition of the National Environmental Council (Conama),
reducing the number of members from 96 to 23, of which 10 were government
appointees. Civil representation on the council was reduced to four members, selected
by lottery.
The disastrous environmental
management of the Bolsonaro government resulted, from
its first year in power, in an increased rate of deforestation, which has since
increasingly diverged from climate agreement goals. The rising deforestation
rate was soon criticised, even by segments of the economy, so that in 2020 the
structure of the MMA underwent further changes. Through Decree No. 10,455
(Brazil, 2020a), the Ministry once again included a secretariat for climate,
the Secretariat of Climate and International Relations, and for the Amazon
rainforest, The Secretariat of the Amazon and Environmental Services. However,
environmentalists expressed their distrust of this reorganisation as follows:
[...] For Adriana Ramos, from the Socioenvironmental
Institute (ISA), “the best example that the government has taken several
cosmetic measures just to counter, as the government itself says, the narrative
that it considers to be an ‘international smear campaign’ is the issue of
climate change having returned to the agenda subordinate to International
Relations, as if we only dealt with climate change from here on out, but had no
responsibility [for the issue] at home”, she said (Prizibisczki, 2020,
unpaginated).
The reactivation of the National
Council for the Legal Amazon was, likewise, seeking to demonstrate a response by
the government to the dissatisfaction of Brazilian and foreign companies, which
were signalling the market’s “nervousness” by threatening to boycott Brazilian
products as a response to the growing figures for deforestation. Initially
created in 1995, the Council sat within the structure of the MMA. Decree No.
10,239/2020 (Brazil, 2020b) established a link between the Council and the
Vice-Presidency of the Republic and excluded from its composition the governors
of the states forming the Legal Amazon[6]. It also strengthened the military
leadership working in 14 ministries allied to the government. Furthermore, it excluded
agencies working to protect the Amazon rainforest, in areas of reserves and Indigenous
lands, such as ICMBio, the National Indian Foundation (Funai) and civil society
organisations.
As a strategy to obscure the
“environmental issue”, attacks on research institutes and controlling the
dissemination of environmental monitoring results played an important role.
Publications by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which reveal
an exponential increase in deforestation and degradation alerts in the Amazon, were
contested by the federal government. In response to the uncomfortable result
that, between the first half of 2018 and the first half of 2019, Brazil
recorded an 88% increase in deforestation alerts, 38% in indigenous lands and
85% in Federal Conservation Units, the government reacted not only by
discrediting the Institute and its research, but also by dismissing researchers
who held leadership and coordination positions in the agency. Shortly after the
release of this data, physicist Ricardo Galvão was dismissed from his position
as director of INPE. In 2020, the coordinator of Earth Observation, Lúbia
Vinhas, was dismissed from her position after the release of data showing a
record number of deforestation alerts: in June 2020, the alerts covered an area
of 1,034.4 km², the largest coverage in the month of June since 2015
(National Association of Environmental Services, 2020).
Bolsonaro’s decision that the
alarming data from INPE be reported to the government before being released
publicly was an unequivocal demonstration of his intention to censor
environmental monitoring in the Legal Amazon. In July 2019, the deforestation
alert covered an area of 2,254.9 km², an increase of 278% compared to July 2018. In the
first half of 2020, this number rose to 3,069.57 km², representing an increase of 25% compared to the
first half of 2019 (After..., 2020).
Regarding
international consensus, disagreement with agreed goals was a hallmark of the
Bolsonaro government and the setback regarding the Sustainable Development
Goals is revealing. The pact, containing 17 goals and 169 targets to be
achieved by 2030, considers the eradication of poverty to be the “[...]
greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable
development” (United Nations, 2015, unpaginated). The inclusion of these
targets in the approved Multi-Year Plan (PPA) 2020-2023 (Brazil, 2019c) was
vetoed, yet another piece of evidence that does not match the discourse that
sought to convince Brazilian society and international nations that
sustainability was central to the government’s efforts, as Bolsonaro stated at the IV Forum of the
Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development of the
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC/UN), in March
2021.
Agriculture,
overseen by MAPA, is one of the largest economic contributors to deforestation
and shared the same theme as the environment in the 2020-2023 PPA. Defined as
an environmental axis, almost R$140 billion were allocated for the period of
the plan, with 98.5% of the resources for MAPA’s operations and the remainder
for the MMA (ClimaInfo, 2019). The priorities set in the budget are further
proof of the neoliberal political project of the Bolsonaro government, aligned
with predatory capitalist logic, to serve the agribusiness sector, which is expanding
over Brazilian territory. This has deepened the disregard for human needs and
the environmental conditions on which they depend, especially traditional
communities and Indigenous peoples.
The “coach and
horses” which reshaped regulations, scrapped inspection agencies, and removed
sources of funding, resulted in a Brazil with little environmental protection,
allowing loggers, land grabbers, illegal miners, and the agribusiness and
mining sectors to take centre stage, benefiting the advancement of their
economic ventures. The results were disastrous. From 2019 to 2022,
deforestation rates became an even more worrying, with a 59.5% increase in the area
deforested in the Amazon. The executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, Marcio
Astrini, pointed out that Bolsonaro took over the country with an annual rate
of 7,500 km² of deforestation in the Amazon annually and ended his term with
11,500 km². At the same time, there was a 38% drop in fines applied by the
Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama),
compared to the period 2015-2018, as shown in graph 1:
Graph 1 – Deforestation in the Amazon and Ibama fines
for violations against flora
%20English_arquivos/image008.png)
Source: reproduced from
Leal, Angelo and Araújo (2023).
The evidence
presented here demonstrates that Bolsonaro and his ministerial team spared no
effort in safeguarding the interests of the dynamics of capital. This contributed
to an increase in the environmental destructiveness that plagues contemporary times
and had unequal impacts depending on social class. On the stage of history,
this government was yet another example of what a decadent bourgeois ideology can
achieve in reality.
4
Conclusion
The summary
presented here does not claim to be an exhaustive list of the actions
implemented by the Bolsonaro government in dismantling management of the environment,
but we believe it is sufficient to demonstrate how ideological decadence, the
ideal expression of the crisis of capital, was able to mobilise regressive
practices regarding previously achieved advances. This government has made it
clear that capital and its offensive against labour and the goddess Gaia
are very real and are placing us on a dangerous path. Those who believe that
Bolsonaro governed in an improvised and inexperienced manner are mistaken. With
the support of groups guided by reactionary and moral values, the myth
was given the mission of accelerating the processes that would guarantee
greater flexibility and freedom for the development of commodity production, marking
the place that Brazil has historically occupied in the international division
of labour: that of an agrarian-exporting country.
Counter to the
farcical denialism guiding the policy of dismantling environmental management,
history was quick to reveal what was behind the smokescreen: our wealth, labour,
and natural resources, privately appropriated by capital that was, and is,
staked to feed the insane logic of the commodity. Confronting the
“environmental issue” needs to be at the centre of the class struggle, with the
objective of overcoming capitalism’s control over social metabolism, the State,
and its governmental variations, as a bulwark of decadent bourgeois ideology.
In other words, combating ideological decadence and its practical implications
requires confronting the order of capital, a revolutionary struggle against a
mode of production of life based on the exploitation of labour and devastation
of nature, and whose ideal expression is increasingly decadent, in a purposeful
hypocrisy (Marx; Engels, 2007) so that capital can advance over nature in a
wasteful and destructive way.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Carla Alessandra da Silva NUNES. Worked on the concept, delineation, and critical revision of the
article.
Social Worker and
graduate of the Federal University of Sergipe (1995). Master’s degree in
education from the Federal University of Sergipe (2000), and Doctorate in
Social Service from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2019). Associate
Professor of the Department of Social Service at the Federal University of
Sergipe and of the Post-graduate Programme in Social Service (PROSS-UFS). Researcher
on the Marxist Studies and Research Group (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas
Marxistas (GEPEM-UFS)) and of the Observatório das Metrópoles (Aracaju nucleus).
Adriana Carla de
Jesus PEREIRA. Worked on data analysis and interpretation and on the
writing of the article. Bachelor’s degree in social work from the Federal
University of Sergipe (2017). Postgraduate degree (lato sensu) in Social
Assistance and Public Health from Faculdade Venda Nova do Imigrante (2021). Master’s
degree in social work from the Postgraduate Program in Social Work at the
Federal University of Sergipe. Member of the Marxist Studies and Research Group
(GEPEM-UFS).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Editors responsible
Ana Targina Ferraz – Chief Editor
Camilla dos Santos Nogueira – Thematic
Editor
Submitted on: 29/2/2024. Revised on:
5/7/2024. Accepted on:
12/7/2024.
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