Unsustainability! This is the “momentum”.

by Laercio Bruno Filho

The media always brings us information about global warming, dangerous gas emissions,
exhaustion of natural resources, oil leakage, deforestation, armed conflicts. An upsetting
scenario.

To preserve life with some dignity is a question of global interest and involves our future and
the future of generations to come. However, questions related to sustainable development
and land habitability, are more recent and less known or hardly ever approached as a subject
by most people. And this should be different.

With the intention of encouraging the discussion and articulate the arguments needed to
reflection, I introduce a theme which I find to be one of the most critic and complex themes
when we talk about humanity and the ecosystems that grant its existence- the model of
production and the way we consume it.

The current social economics model breakdown.

The current system results in a heavy political and socio-environmental responsibility. And it
tends to get more serious in the long run, compromising the quality of life in the future.

The threat of breakdown of natural resources on account of the high and crescent demand for
food and consumer goods connected to the deterioration of the trade relations between work
and capital has resulted in a perverse enrichment of the minority, leading most to poverty.
That brought more distance between social classes and between nations. If we continue at
this pace, the scenario will become aggravated.

On the climatic side, rivers are overflowing more frequently each time in Switzerland, Brazil,
in the USA, in Germany and China. IPCC studies show that we are facing less “cold days” and
more “hot days”. In the Arctic, the Andes mountain range and in central Europe, layers of ice
and snow are melting.

On the economic one, English scientist Nicolas Stern reports in his study that, taking care of
the climate on the planet would cost between 1 and 2 percent of the world’s GDP, but richer
countries, the ones that pollute the most still hesitate in acting. The group of the
“economically developed” is going through their worst financial crisis of the last 70 years,
with high rates of unemployment. Countries are going bankrupt and they threat to bring good
part of the Euro zone with them.

While we read this article, hundreds of people die from armed conflicts or from extreme
poverty in Africa, Middle East and Asia.
Vectors that tend to evolve with no exception, for rich or poor countries.

Recent studies conducted by credited institutions show that, considering current consuming
patterns from the world’s population today, we need 2.5 more planets Earth for it to handle
its demand for food, leisure and comfort. We are talking about Ecologic Footprint, that’s how
the indicator that shoes the effort of the planet to sustain current civilization is known for.

For us to have a better notion of the impact over the planet, it is interesting to observe that
we took 300 thousand years to become 2.5 billion people in 1950. And since then until today,
we raise our numbers and we are more than 6.7 billion human beings, consuming a lot of
everything. So in only 60 years, the world’s population increased its numbers more than two
times double and the consumption speed of those resources has also increased in a vertical
leap.
The planet didn’t get warmer for nothing
Let’s consider that only a significant part of the world’s population, the one from the
countries known as “emerging economies”, formed by chinese, indian, and Brazilians, wish,
for example, to purchase a vehicle, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a plane ticket, or even
eat meat and fish. Desires, that are original and well deserved, which represent some
consuming items and comfort in today’s average world.

Talking about the environmental consequences to support that demand in a singular way, this
is what could happen.

• There would be a raise in the demand for fossil fuel. More extraction and refining to
produce fuel to enable all logistics involved. Generated impact: a raise of the
Greenhouse Gases (GEE) and Global Warming, contamination of the soil and hydric
resources. Oil leakage happen during the extraction (BP: Gulf of Mexico) or storage
(Petrobras/Baia da Guanabara-2000)
• Rise in the extraction of mineral for manufacturing of the steel needed to make the
goods. Impact generated: soil degradation, silting of rivers and lakes, deforestation,
they demand more energy and consequently more emission of greenhouse gases and
other heavy pollutants into the atmosphere, rivers and oceans.
• The intensification of energy used for equipment operations in the production of
durable and consuming goods. Impact generated: overload in the global temperature
from the burning of fossil fuel and for the flooding of new areas, now forest areas, for
the production of more hydrologic energy, increase in the toxic and nuclear residue.
• Rise of the demand in all raw material chain, workforce and secondary inputs for
manufacturing, delivery logistics and usage of aggregate components like paper,
plastic, steel. Impact generated: over exploration of natural resources and bigger
exposal of the biomes to risk of exhaustion and extinction.
• Rise of the demand for food. Impact generated: Intensification of deforestation and
degradation of the earth by the chain of agribusiness, exhaustion of the aquifers by
inadequate methods of planting and irrigation. Just to mention a few of them.

However, for the exposal not to look just partial we have to consider that this is not only
about a chain of destruction and a price that comes with it. There is also a parallel chain of
construction and benefits and that allow us a comparative reflection about this relation.

Unfortunately this relation is marked by a profound unbalance, because the current

socioeconomic regime, excluder, does not allow that most part of the population can use
benefits like food, medication, technology and what is worse, those who can, spend a lot
doing it.

In 2030 we will be 9 billion people on earth.

Is this the moment of a profound and extensive reevaluation needed from principles and
current values, once the current civilization is getting close to the breakdown limit of its
natural resources?

Most part of the borders to survival is already mapped. We already know what they are and
where they are.
The most complex thing is what is left, to conceive which are going to be the new social
environmental fundaments for an innovative global hegemony and which are going to be the
viable economic paradigms for this new era.
How to conciliate the desires of a society that learned to worship the image of offer excess to
a scenario of limitation and shortage in the future?
Kant and the Age of Enlightenment
The last great revolution of ideas that effectively changed the world was set in the first half
of the 18th century with the Enlightenment, when there was a convergence of philosophic,
social, political, intellectual and religious trends, resulting in a vast group of values and new
structural and pragmatic principles that guided us until today.
We have become the evolution from that moment on and now we realize that we need
another great era of transformation.

The great thinker Immanuel Kant defined: “The Age of Enlightenment represents the escape
of human beings from the guardianship that they had imposed to themselves. The tutored are
those who find themselves incapable of using reason regardless of the direction of others, and
if guilty of their own guardianship, when it result not from a difficulty of knowledge but from
the lack of resolution and courage to make use of this knowledge regardless of the direction
of others. Sapere aude! Be courageous to use your own reason! – That is the motto of the Age
of Enlightenment.”

And that is what we need.

Laércio Bruno Filho

Professor invited by MBA PECEGE from ESALQ/USP for the discipline of Agribusiness.
Coordinator and Relator for the Group of Studies of Carbon in Forests in the realm of the
Volunteer Market at FIESP/ABNT, Member of the Group for Studies on Sustainability at
CETEL/Business School São Paulo and Member of the Group for Studies on Ethics and
Sustainability at CRA-SP.
Director of New Social Environmental Businesses and Coordinator of the Organizational
Sustainability Program Management Technique and Coordinator of Sustainable Development
for the Communities at eSENSE Company.