Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
One can say that all UN conferences and reports had an impact in Brazil. After
the 1970s, the environmental movement and its developments became more and
more international. Lutzenberger, for one, had contacts and personal friends on fi ve
continents.
It is in the international political level that one may fi nd unbalanced perspectives
from the northern and southern hemispheres, regardless of the fact that such a dis-
tinction is not so pertinent anymore. To take just one example: the low carbon econ-
omy target. In the present international system, the world is divided into three
economic superpowers, namely, the USA, the European Union, and China. Another
group of fi ve great economic powers is formed by Japan, India, Brazil, Russia, and
South Korea. In practice, the confl ict of interests is not a matter of north versus
south. It is the European Union versus all the others, because the EU emphasizes the
need to create a World Environmental Organization, as powerful as the World Trade
Organization. South Korea and Japan sympathize with the idea, but do not embrace
it. Brazil, regardless of some recent feeble efforts, still has a highly polluting energy
matrix; and consequently does not have much interest in contributing to the con-
struction of a Global Environmental Governance. On the other side of the spectrum
we fi nd the United States and China, which are very powerful in the global geopo-
litical scene, but are in strong opposition to the adoption of international antipollu-
tion laws.
Lutzenberger was aware that the political fi ght was not suffi cient. It needed
transformation in the education system and culture. He was an eager reader in many
areas of knowledge. This gave him a lot of ammunition to make pungent criticisms
of the present universities performance in the education of our youth. Lutzenberger
strongly advocated the importance of environmental philosophy, claiming that it
was fundamental as far as future generations are concerned. He pointed out that due
to the conservative curricula that students in general are subject to, almost all fi nish
their schooling in complete ignorance of both science and technology. It looks like,
he said, that universities have only succeeded in deadening the student's critical
faculties and sensibilities. In view of the compartmentalization of knowledge
adopted by most universities, students obtain their degrees without even having a
single class about the theories of evolution (sometimes even forbidden) and
ecology.
Furthermore, he regarded the prevailing reductionism as a major problem.
Especially in economics, he said, we need a completely new paradigm. “If this
approach to university education continues, young people will only grow up to
become agents of the grotesque, suicidal juggernaut that modern industrial civiliza-
tion has become. That needs to be changed” (Lutzenberger
1996
, p. 42).
Lutzenberger adopted and disseminated the idea that the “Living Planet” should
be seen as a whole, that life is a continuous chain of interactions, which goes from
bacteria to the most sophisticated organisms, all of which are interdependent.
Mutatis mutandis
, to build an effective approach to Earth stewardship, one must
overcome the deleterious religious and philosophical theories that postulate anthro-
pocentrism as well as the Cartesian dualism. The drive for universality, for
homogeneity, even for equality should also be discarded. It is only through the
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