Marina Silva

Transcription

Thank you, Marconi, for this invitation to participate in TED, and I want to start this participation saying three things. First, I am going to speak about the place from which I speak. Second, the context of this speech, that we are here. And third, some messages that I want to leave here, in this 18-minute speech. You can already see that just in this introduction, you will hear the word, “speak” many times. I am trying to introduce what I will talk to you about though what I will say in these 18 minutes of speech. I am completely in love with words. Words have had me hooked since I was a child, when I started to hear poems and cordel stories that my grandmother would tell, at the edge of my hammock, in the middle of the Amazon Forest, with a lamp lit in my state, Acre. So, talking about the place where I speak from, I want to show a bit of the threads that wove my life. Many people spoke about so many important things here, and obviously each person here has a life path that makes us be who we are with the pain and the joy of being who we are. So, I am no different, right? On this path, woven by each thread that I consider to be the most important, that symbolically, I chose to put here. This idea of being in love with words, as I said, started there in the Breu Velho area of the Bagaço rubber field, with my grandma, a very intelligent northeastern woman, who couldn’t read but could learn a full cordel poem by heart, after only hearing it read out loud twice. One of these poems was called, “The songs of the Sanatana Fair,” by Inácio da Catingueira, whose pen name was, Inácio of the Big City. And my grandma would start to recite to me what the presenter would do before the songs started. It was more or less like this…I think has everything to do with what we are experiencing a bit of here at this TED. “Today here you have to see the snail lightning. The fog stops, causes a solar eclipse. The water of the ocean dries and I catch a whale with a fishing pole.” I would hear these words as a little girl and I became enchanted, and would think: “My god, just because people are going to start to sing, all of these cosmic phenomenon are occurring?” This was the power of words, the transformative power of verbs that entered into action at that moment of the singing. My life was nurtured and stimulated in a situation that I consider to be very difficult. But I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre, when he says that we are not the result and the product of everything the past did to us. We are the result and the product of everything that we do with our past. If we could be capable of doing good things with the past that we have, be it personal, social or civil, we could definitely cause great transformations, create very good things, even when it is a difficult past. If I were the result and product of what the past did to me, I would not even be here. I was illiterate until the age of 16, had malaria 5 times, hepatitis 3, leishmaniasis once and a very difficult situation of semi-slave work in the Amazon rubber fields. The past does not force us to be the product of what it did to us. We are the ones who need to learn to do something good with this past. I was born in a service unit, in an isolated rubber field area in the middle of the forest, one hour away from the nearest house. My father was from the northeast and knew how to write and do arithmatic. On Saturdays and Sundays, he dedicated his time to teaching people how to not get taken advantage of by the bosses when selling rubber. My mom was the best seamstress, from plain clothes, to wedding atire. And she did it all for free. My grandmother was a midwife who walked for hours and hours in the rain or sun, at night or during the day, to deliver babies, in the whole area. My uncle was a shaman, he was the most well-known of the whole region. He was able to find people lost in the forest just by feeling and listening to the sound of the wind. He was also the healer of the region, he fixed rifles, was a blacksmith, wove baskets, and made some ceramics. I learned a lot from him. And they did all of this for free. This was my childhood and my adolescence. Later, in my youth, I met Chico Mendes, and I learned all these things with him. The fight to stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, since 1979, was when this fight started. Dom Moacyr Grechi and other keepers of utopia that passed through my life. Such as Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Florestan Fernandes, Aziz Ab'Saber and all the other keepers of utopia that have inspired me over 54 years to also be a keeper of utopia. These are the threads that have woven my life. And now I am going to go to the second part. The moment when all of these woven lives, here, in Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after Eco 92, are here discussing the future of Brazil, the future of the planet. And this has to do with the context that we are creating here, this speaking and this listening. The context is that we are living in a context of crisis. A crisis that is characterized by multiple crises: an economic crisis, a social crisis, an environmental crisis. A political crisis and a crisis of values. And at the base of all of this, the political crisis and the crisis of values have a great influence. They are the ones who, in an economic crisis, sacrifice the resources of thousands and thousands of years, for the profit of only a few decades. It is this crisis that separates ecology from economy, that separates ethics from politics. And we are investing in a project of power for power and money for money that is turning us into true exterminators of the future. I heard here that people have a terrible thirst to consume. And it is true, we are consuming. That is why I try to prove that the sustainable development that we all defend is not just a way of doing things. It is not just a way of making energy cleaner or whatever. It is a way of being. If we adopt a new attitude towards life, valuing being instead of doing, having and appearing, because we are already living the worst of it. When we are not able to do, when we are not able to have, we are obliged to appear that we have, appear that we do. And this makes us all sick. We are living with a sickness called “the evil of excess.” Today we are living with the evil of excess. What is lacking for us is the lack of lack. We are consuming the planet, we are consuming our time, we are separating the economy from ecology and the great investment that humanity must make is in reencountering with our civilizatory childhood. We have very little time in a life dedicated to doing and having. For thousands and thousands of years we were oriented by the potential of being. The Romans wanted to be large and free. The Greeks wanted to be knowledgeable and free. In the Middle Ages, people wanted to be saints, despite the many sins that were committed in the name of sainthood. One day, mercantilism arrived and transformed us into beings that do, do, do, and do. And being a philosopher turned into doing science, and being a scientist turned into doing science, and being an artist turned into making art, and to cut to make the story short, we arrived here in the XXI century and in our country, a loving relationship between two people became making love. And in a civilization where all we do is do, do, do, we need space to put everything that we do and make and that is why we loose today a thousand times more biodiversity than we lost in the last 50 years. That is why we are on the verge of increasing the planet’s temperature two degrees and putting all of the life on Earth at risk. We need to find the initial civilizatory portions of ourselves again, when we were oriented by being. We don’t ask a child what he will do when he grows up. We ask the children what they will be when they grow up. We need to know and define, choose, what we want as a civilization, as a human race, in our relationships with each other, in our relationships with ourselves and with other forms of existence. This is sustainable development. Sustainable development is not a way of doing, it is a way of being. The sustainable being of the XXI century must be so from an economic, social, environmental, cultural, political, ethical and even esthetic point of view. There is a dimension of esthetic sustainability that should be respected. Sustainable development is the wise use of resources of thousands of years, so as not to sacrifice them in the name of profit of just a few decades. And its good that we are here having this discussion because I feel that more and more, with these economic, social, environmental, political and values crises, we don’t have to ask ourselves if we are optimists or pessimists. We have to be persistent. And where does our persistence come from? Our persistence comes from the incredible capacity that human beings have to believe, to create. I don’t mean to believe in a naïve way. It is not naïve credulity, which believes that things will happen like by magic. It is our capacity to believe, creating today the future that we want. And the future that we want includes doing something with this past that we have. The past made us fight to break the limits of nature, that stopped us from producing more to have more food and to have shelter, to take better care of our health and to live longer. The problem is that trying to erase the limits that nature has put on us, we come up against the limits of nature itself. And how can we continue free, productive and creative in a limited world? It is only possible to continue being free, productive and creative in a limited world if we leave our terrain that is comfortable, but stagnant in terms of choice, to uncomfortable terrain, but that is not stagnant in terms of choice. With this choice, I only have to look at the two options and decide. “Do I stay with this one that is more advantageous, or with that one that is less advantageous?” With this choice, I can choose that which does not exist. Sustainable development does not yet exist. But we can choose it. And the choice that we make, we have to believe in it. Creating the conditions within militancy that is no longer a militancy lead by the governments, by the corporations and by the political parties. It is a self-written militancy. I see here that people are so mobilized by this urge for authorship, an urge for co-authorship. The authorial militants or the activists, they are not people that fit into the limited camp of opposition or situation. Because opposition for opposition does not see the virtues, even those that stand out. And situation for situation does not see the problems, even those that stand out just equally. The authorial militancy of civilization that Brazil and the world needs is that which holds a position. And having a position means doing like Chico Mendes did, he held a position against those who wanted to destruct the Amazon. It is holding a position against those who want to continue using fossil fuels that destroy the planet. And a position favorable to those that protect the forest, that change our energy model, those that produce more, using less and less natural resources. It is being open to dividing the authorship, the realization, the recognition of that fact that that which we do in union is not a naïve union that only does things to be good, and that is why we do things like this. We do things like this because we need each other. That is why we need to learn to put ourselves in a position of being multi-centric leaders of multi-centric processes. Not wanting to be the leader of everything and wanting to be the leader of the rest, putting ourselves in the position of the bow and of the arrow. Putting ourselves in the position of one minute pushing and the next minute being pushed. Putting ourselves in the position of learning from one another to do the things that many people think can only be done by those who are illuminated. I want to end by telling a short story of one of these threads. I was 19 years old. A large struggle was taking place at the Catuaba rubber field, in Livramento, where the jagunços, or armed guards, where trying to expel the rubber-tappers in the 70s. The Comissão Pastoral da Terra sent me and another 17-year-old girl in a small canoe to bring supplies to the rubber-tappers, because the jagunços were cutting off their food supply. We went into that situation, passed everyday with food and no one ever stopped us from passing through. First of all, because of a certain machismo, because we were fragile girls and second, because they could never imagine that within that canoe there was food for the rubber-tappers. Once, in a meeting, when I was already 27, our subconscious makes traps, and I wanted to receive compliments and I said to the Bishop Dom Moacyr, who taught me a lot. “Dom Moacyr, but how did you let me and Selma, two fragile girls with so little experience, into the eye of that hurricane?” And Dom Moacyr looked at me and said: “My daughter, when we don’t have people to send, we will send anyone.” I received that message and after that day I discovered that anyone can do a lot. Anyone can do what no one does. You just have to assume that authorship, the position of the bow and of the arrow. And that is why I want to honor Rio+20, by asking all Brazilians to put themselves in the position of the bow and of the arrow, to push the leaders that are omitting their responsibility in saving the planet. Of the bow that pushes the arrow, I want the force that sets it off. Of the target that is set, I want to make it be desired. Of the desire with which I search for the target, I want love for reason. This is the only way that I will not have weapons and that I will not start wars. And this is how my passage through this world will make sense. I am a bow, I am an arrow. I am whole in halves. I am the parts that mix in their purposes and their desires. I am the bow first and the arrow second. I am the arrow first and the bow second. When You search for the best in me, You will have the best of me. I will give my best, where the world needs it. The world needs anyone. In the position of the bow, so that we can make sustainable development happen in Brazil and anywhere that we can put ourselves in the position of the bow to push this new challenge forward.