The climate crisis that threatens life on Earth is not isolated from popular struggles for land, territory and food sovereignty. In Brazil, through organisations such as Teia dos Povos (People’s Web), or within the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), we have produced diagnoses based on the experiences of struggles by popular movements and the intertwining of the crises that have been systematically ignored by national states and promoted by big business. Here, we reflect on three dimensions of this polycrisis: the global hunger crisis; climate change; and the deepening of capitalist domination through exacerbated job insecurity. We believe that, in Brazil, a radical environmentalism enacted by popular movements can protect us from these three dimensions, transforming the struggle for land into a fundamental struggle for Planet Earth.

Peoples’ territories and the ‘deterritorialised’ majority

Forced urbanisation has been a condition of capitalist development, transforming people who once had their livelihoods tied to nature into potential wage labourers. Meanwhile, nature itself was transformed into ‘natural resources’. The term is interesting; as one of Brazil’s most important indigenous intellectuals, Ailton Krenak, asks: ‘natural resource for whom?’ ¹KRENAK, Ailton. Ideas to postpone the end of the world. São Paulo: Publisher: Companhia das Letras, 2019, p.22.. in Europe, before the great enclosures, most people lived in a vigorous relationship with the environment, with the biome and, in some sense, promoted symbiosis with nature. Under capitalism, humanity has continually and increasingly disassociated from nature. Colonial expansion imposed this perspective on the spaces of Amerindian and African peoples who – as a rule – held nature sacred and therefore defended it daily in their way of life. This is not to say that this colonial perspective has been adopted by all people living under capitalism. Ailton Krenak also reminds us that for many indigenous peoples, nature is not yet a commodity: ‘the Rio Doce [river], which we Krenak call Watu, our grandfather, is a person, not a resource, as the economists say’. There are still people who do not see nature as a commodity, and others have not been drawn into capital’s cycle of absorption and expulsion of formal wage labourers, actively seeking to avoid this fate. We call the areas where they live territories of life, or peoples’ territories: places where nature is defended because ways of life are closely linked to the land and there is still a sacredness in the way biomes are seen and lived. 

In Brazil, we know that the territories where indigenous people, riverside dwellers, geraizeiros, quilombolas, caiçaras and other traditional peoples live are already significantly protected in biodiversity and extent. According to the MAP Biomas 2023 study, indigenous lands occupy 13.9% of the national territory, but contain 20.4% of native vegetation. These territories are among the least deforested, accounting for only 0.9% of deforestation in the last 30 years. On the other hand, private land in Brazil lost 69.3% of its native vegetation in the same period. This data is impossible to ignore, either in thinking about a possible future for these peoples, or in building a perspective of radical environmentalism for all people. In order to build a possible future for the peoples, it is fundamental to think about the question of land: private ownership of land is one of the main vectors of the catastrophe we are discussing. On the other hand, defending the territories of peoples who suffer from environmental racism – capitalism’s strong arm for deterritorialising and making people and nature vulnerable – is all the more important because these can be spaces of resistance and transformation that guarantee the reproduction of life.

What makes biome conservation possible is precisely the collective ownership of land by these peoples. There can be no real conservation of a biome – beyond fragile, short-term arrangements – when there is land insecurity. Growing forests is a means of fighting climate change, but it requires asking where those forests will be, who owns the land to be regenerated, and whether intergenerational security is offered for its maintenance and conservation; in other words, the means for territorial sovereignty ensure long-term sustainability of the tactic employed. The kind of diffuse environmentalism that advocates for planting trees in a symbolic way, or that regenerates private land to compensate for the impact of mining or industries, does not present a project for society that prevents generalised destruction or the risk of a new cycle of destruction driven by profit  interests. On the contrary, such forms of environmentalism have been seen to favour false market solutions, facilitating speculation and the deepening of the logic of the commodification of nature. Thus, any effort to recover a degraded area is always liable to turn back into timber for the market within a few decades, because the process of regenerating a piece of land is disconnected from the way of life, uses, and living conditions of the people who live on that land.

Peoples who are territorialised link their land to their way of life. Accordingly, they tend to be more autonomous than wage labourers in the face of capital – not only in their ability to access water and food, but also in their experience of community life, which remains a condition for political organisation. Álvaro García Linera, former vice-president of Bolivia, explains it:

in the community, the means of labour are not private property in the mercantile sense of the term, nor is labour concentrated as a commodity, nor is it incorporated into the labour process in order to increase value, nor is the direct worker subject to the means of labour.²GARCÍA LINERA, Álvaro. The plebeian power: collective action and indigenous, labour and popular identities in Bolivia. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010, p. 62.

Thus another relationship with land, as a means of labour for the peoples, is possible. For Linera, ‘the possibility of an authentic insurgency against the domination of capital is unthinkable if it is on the margins of the communal class and its struggle to universalise the rationality that characterises it’.

The possibility of an international just transition, encompassing not only elements of the energy transition, but also a break with capitalism’s other, various and entwined models for nature’s destruction, requires mobilisation and massive action: a great climate rebellion that connects different struggles. It is necessary to push back against the destruction of living conditions on our planet, and this undoubtedly involves the knowledge, struggles, ways of life, and organisation of peoples who still live in their communes, in their territories of life.

In the territories of destruction, where capital submits the Earth to its whim, the relationship between nature and civilisation is severed. These are the big cities, monoculture latifundia, places impacted by mining, and many other sites where life is subordinated to profit. These territories have grown at a rapid pace in recent decades, casting more and more people into an indirect war with nature.

In the last four decades, the rise of neoliberal thinking in Brazilian society has contributed to greater vulnerability of those living on the margins of cities. The urban population of Brazil has grown since the 1950s, as a result of demographic expansion within cities as well as migration from the countryside to cities. The latest IBGE census (2022) demonstrates that at least 61% of the population lives in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Neoliberalism then accelerated the disintegration of the formal economy, which was already unable to absorb the urban labour supply. This has led to a massive increase in informality. Those workers who, through primitive accumulation across generations, had become deterritorialised, found themselves in increasingly precarious and uncertain conditions, detached from their traditional networks of support.

Capital has won a new victory here: workers are becoming less and less fixed in their jobs, and the power of their unions and class organisations is not as strong. Far from their grandparents’ fields, their parents’ backyards and work assemblies, the majority are more dependent on bosses and markets. It is such people, detached from their ancestral regions and ways of life, whom we call deterritorialised. By the power of capital, they have been disconnected from a peaceful life with nature, without any land to call their own.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, a rural exodus has been intensified by the spread of the metropolitan way of life as a consumer dream, in a continuous production of bad-places (places of capital). The fewer people that remained on the land, the more vulnerable it became to concentration of ownership. We know that 1% of rural landowners in Brazil already hold half of the cultivated areas³See Zimerman, A., Correia, K.C., Silva, M.P. (2022). Land Inequality in Brazil: Conflicts and Violence in the Countryside. In: Ioris, A.A.R., Mançano Fernandes, B. (eds) Agriculture, Environment and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10264-6_6. This use of land does not respect nature, nor does it seek to root people in rural communities or strive to produce food for the population. On the contrary: those who work for large rural landowners are generally disconnected from the land and forced into producing food not as a life source for the people, but as a commodity for the international market.

Brazil’s model of land ownership is in large part responsible for the increasing destruction of the Amazon, the intensification of the Pantanal fires, the real risk of the end of the Cerrado, and the desertification of the Caatinga. Most of Brazil’s historical greenhouse gas emissions come from this destruction, making Brazil one of the world’s biggest emitters. In this context, even if Brazil were making real progress towards a just energy transition – which is not the case given the absence of a fossil fuel phase-out plan – the overall objective of curbing climate change would not be achieved. Transition requires not just phasing in renewable sources of energy, but attending to biomes, territories, and the people who live in them.

Take, for example, the catastrophe that Rio Grande do Sul experienced between late April and early May 2024. By 21 May, the historic flood had left more than 580,000 homeless, 182 dead and 22% of the state’s population affected. Estimates of the economic damage exceed 12 billion reais. This is the same state that from 1985 to 2022 replaced 3.5 million hectares of native vegetation, equivalent to 22% of its natural ground cover, with monocultures (mainly soya). Rio Grande do Sul had been a pioneer of environmental policies in Brazil, until recent governments dismantled environmental standards to feed the insatiable greed of agribusiness and property speculation. While state institutions rushed to enable this catastrophe of environmental destruction and deterritorialisation, the sluggishness of the federal government has made it impossible to demarcate 65 indigenous territories, which are still unratified. The case of Rio Grande do Sul seems to be a clear example of how the unbridled use of land as private property precipitates and deepens crisis; certainly, it illustrates that a safer environment is necessarily one that retains its native vegetation. And this cannot be rebuilt without thinking about a popular, radical environmentalism that can bring together the dispossessed in a struggle to regenerate soils and biomes.

There is a relationship between migration away from the land, which contributes to a majority that is dispossessed and distanced from nature, and a growing dependence of the working class on capital. A direct example is access to food. A system now prevails in which food is a commodity and the land is subjected to processes of environmental degradation for the production of export commodities, which are given priority over people’s health and lives. When the food that is fundamental to people’s material existence becomes the product of one of the cruellest industries, a condition for rebellion is compromised.We understand that food sovereignty is an emancipatory condition for the people’s struggle⁴See FERREIRA, Joelson; FELÍCIO, Erahsto. For land and territory: paths of the peoples’ revolution in Brazil. Arataca (BA): Teia dos Povos, 2021. Food sovereignty does not just mean having access to food on a daily basis, but also access to land, creole seeds, and the conditions for growing, storing and processing healthy food. A people without food sovereignty has very little room for political manoeuvre. The same can be argued about energy sovereignty, where similar dynamics of land concentration and deterritorialisation apply especially to mega-development projects.

So, we must look at where our majorities live and ask what chances there are to expand the conditions of emancipation in cities. Although struggle in Brazil’s urban peripheries is fundamental, conditions for emancipation are today constrained not only by poor access to the means of survival, but also by militarisation of the state, militias, and drug factions, and by more advanced and capacious systems of control and surveillance, which suppress both life itself and free political organisation. 

Meanwhile, the existing territories of the peoples possess unique capacities for the defence of planet Earth, but their contribution to climate rebellion is constrained by their small number. We therefore urgently need to build more territories of life beyond the spaces of struggle and resistance in urban peripheries.

This also implies thinking about communal life beyond mainstream traditions or conventional ideas of belonging. As a result of coloniality, some rebellious traditions have had to be built. While indigenous communities already had their territories before colonisation and lost them over the years, black people had to build their new communities here, their aquilombamentos. When they fled the territories of destruction (the plantation) they built their communes in the forest.⁵For a reflection on fleeing to the forests as a construction of brown or quilombola refuges, see BONA, Dénètem Touam. Cosmopoetics of Refuge. Translated by Milena P. Duchiade. Florianópolis: Editora Cultura & Barbárie, 2020, p. 47. The history of the quilombos in Brazil – as with that of marooning in other parts of Latin America – is a clue for our political thinking: the countryside can provide a refuge from capitalist destruction, especially forests that produce abundant food.⁶Clóvis Moura argues that the quilombola ‘roça’ was a space for polycultural agriculture, as opposed to the plantation, and abundance as opposed to the precariousness of slave life. See MOURA, Clóvis. The quilombos and the black rebellion. São Paulo: Editora Dandara, 2022, p. 47 and 49

The construction of new territories of life can involve migrants from the peripheries. This would not be at the expense of the ongoing struggles that are finding traction and keeping hope alive in the cities. But those who are no longer able to survive through and in pursuit of alienated labour may be able to regroup in the territories of life. They would turn there to the work of planting and cultivation, which is most urgent given the levels of devastation and deforestation caused by agribusiness and predatory industrial extractivism. A movement of reconstruction and recovery in the countryside would, in turn, contribute to social bases and material conditions for a true transformation of life in urban peripheries.

Belonging to a territory requires more than looking back at our ancestry. We need to understand it as a revolutionary political construction; in other words, from a sense of community built through the sweat of struggle, through the ardour of collective work that takes root. That is how it was in the quilombos, that is how it was in the formation of the peasant movement at the end of the Twentieth Century. Are the MST settlements not new communities formed by struggle? Is there not a sense of belonging there, and a communal life that offers us a horizon for future society? We may also create new senses of belonging, beyond simple ancestry, beyond ethnic categorisation, and based instead on the project of social transformation, rooted in the territories, that faces up to the reality of forced displacement that is presented by each climate disaster.

People’s radical environmentalism

The radical environmentalism of peoples in struggle can be understood by the clear realisation that there is no possibility of protecting nature without freeing the land from the yoke of capitalist exploitation, which in the countryside presents itself as agribusiness. The forests, the waters, the minerals – all of this is on and under the land. Allowing it to continue to be exploited as a commodity means that the essential elements for maintaining life will also be exploited. There is no room for conciliation. The struggle is for land and territory in order to maintain living conditions on this planet for all beings. Although the planet is in the throes of catastrophe, it does not depend on humanity for its continued existence. Humanity’s responsibility to stop the destructive capitalism that threatens life on Earth, which could be causing a sixth mass extinction⁷See Ceballos G. and Ortega-Baes P. La sexta extinción: la pérdida de especies y poblaciones en el Neotrópico. Pp. 95-108, in: Conservación Biológica: Perspectivas de Latinoamérica. (Simonetti J., R., Dirzo, eds.) Editorial Universitaria. Chile: 2011., is about guaranteeing a planet with humans and other beings in our care.

We need to occupy the land of those who are destroying living conditions on the planet. If social movements once focused on the productivity of the latifundia, now attention needs to be centred on their destructiveness. There is history in this regard. In April 2023, the MST occupied a 1,800-hectare tract of land in Jaguaquara, Bahia, where illegal extraction of wood and sand was taking place. The occupation of the land not only stopped the environmental crime, but also turned it over to agroecological food production and income generation for rural workers in the region. This is a path we already know how to build.

For this great task, which requires work, discipline, commitment, and a lot of love, we also need connection to, and involvement from, dispossessed majorities in the big cities. As the climate disaster causes forced displacement and disorganised and precarious internal migration, the construction of new territories of life, with people moving away from the precarity of urban peripheries to plant their communities, becomes an increasingly necessary form of resilience against disaster. This is fundamental not only because the forest is beautiful and necessary, but also because the forest can offer protection to the very people who, otherwise, will be the first to feel the catastrophic effects of climate collapse. 

The global hunger crisis associated with climate change could collapse regional food production and spread hunger like the plague in urban peripheries. Conflicts over water in Brazil and around the world are going to greatly increase.⁸Water scarcity affects approximately 40 per cent of the world’s population and, according to estimates by the United Nations and the World Bank, droughts could put 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030’. See https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-58319129. In Brazil, the CPT recorded 225 water conflicts in 2022, affecting 44,400 families. See https://www.cptnacional.org.br/downlods?task=download.send&id=14292:conflitos-pela-a-gua-2022-tabela-si-ntese&catid=6  The water stress that already exists is likely to worsen in the coming years, and while it will affect the population as a whole, those in urban peripheries will be hit hardest. We have already seen obituaries for springs and streams in the Cerrado, while the Amazon is facing a historic drought. The sources of important Brazilian waterways are becoming sacrifice zones of the landowning class.⁹Ramos Júnior, D. V., & Santos, V. P.. (2023). Energy crisis, water enclosure and resistance: the challenge of building political-epistemic communities. Revista Brasileira De História, 43(92), 29-46. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472023v43n92-04

The process of organising and mobilising those who have been dispossessed of their land is part of building a country-city alliance for a common goal: maintaining the conditions of life on the planet – and this depends on transcending capitalism. It is important to stress that it is not just a question of conserving what little is left of the biomes, but of restoring and recovering them, reconciling the defence of life and the production of healthy, nutritious food in sufficient quantities for rural communities and city dwellers, and the transformation of production, energy, and transport chains in line with climate reality. Here we find a demand for multiple sovereignties, which includes territorial sovereignty as a fundamental condition. 

A common folk saying applies here: ‘toffee¹⁰ The original expression from Brazil in fact refers to a sweet made of whole cane sugar, known as rapadura. is sweet, but it isn’t soft’. Developing a radical environmentalism is an urgent, necessary and beautiful task, and its fruits will be harvested by future generations; but it requires hard work as guardians of life and the Earth. By undoing their subjection to the landowning class and expanding their autonomy vis-à-vis capital, those who partake in this endeavour can fight capital at its first principles, at the very roots of what has grown into a global system.

Agroecology will play an important role in this mission. For the MST and reterritorialised peoples, agroecology is a way of life that generates a symbiosis between society and nature. It cannot be reduced to a set of techniques, because it is through its political perspective that we arrive at the mission of the working class to provide not only real food, but also water, forest, clean air, and other means for its own emancipation.

It is through agroecology that we will be able to sow hope in hearts brutalised by the exploitation of capitalism. There is no room for romanticising and fantasising about the hard work to be done, because the hot sun, and the hard land degraded by monoculture and livestock farming, will have to be faced – and under increasingly adverse climatic conditions. That is why the use of technology and machinery is welcome and necessary, as long as it is subordinated to the objectives and guiding principles of agroecology – a kind of living-well in relationship with nature and in opposition to the exploitation of people by people.

It is through collective, de-alienated labour that humanity will find its freedom. This is an approach in which the communal appropriation of the fruits of labour will allow people to truly savour abundance. Taking the land, building territories and communities committed to the recovery of biomes – these are the main tasks of our generation for an emancipatory socio-ecological transition.

FOOTNOTES

• 1
  KRENAK, Ailton. Ideas to postpone the end of the world. São Paulo: Publisher: Companhia das Letras, 2019, p.22.
• 2
  GARCÍA LINERA, Álvaro. The plebeian power: collective action and indigenous, labour and popular identities in Bolivia. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2010, p. 62.
  
  
• 3
  See Zimerman, A., Correia, K.C., Silva, M.P. (2022). Land Inequality in Brazil: Conflicts and Violence in the Countryside. In: Ioris, A.A.R., Mançano Fernandes, B. (eds) Agriculture, Environment and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10264-6_6
• 4
  See FERREIRA, Joelson; FELÍCIO, Erahsto. For land and territory: paths of the peoples’ revolution in Brazil. Arataca (BA): Teia dos Povos, 2021
• 5
  For a reflection on fleeing to the forests as a construction of brown or quilombola refuges, see BONA, Dénètem Touam. Cosmopoetics of Refuge. Translated by Milena P. Duchiade. Florianópolis: Editora Cultura & Barbárie, 2020, p. 47.
• 6
  Clóvis Moura argues that the quilombola ‘roça’ was a space for polycultural agriculture, as opposed to the plantation, and abundance as opposed to the precariousness of slave life. See MOURA, Clóvis. The quilombos and the black rebellion. São Paulo: Editora Dandara, 2022, p. 47 and 49
• 7
  See Ceballos G. and Ortega-Baes P. La sexta extinción: la pérdida de especies y poblaciones en el Neotrópico. Pp. 95-108, in: Conservación Biológica: Perspectivas de Latinoamérica. (Simonetti J., R., Dirzo, eds.) Editorial Universitaria. Chile: 2011.
• 8
  Water scarcity affects approximately 40 per cent of the world’s population and, according to estimates by the United Nations and the World Bank, droughts could put 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030’. See https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-58319129. In Brazil, the CPT recorded 225 water conflicts in 2022, affecting 44,400 families. See https://www.cptnacional.org.br/downlods?task=download.send&id=14292:conflitos-pela-a-gua-2022-tabela-si-ntese&catid=6 
• 9
  Ramos Júnior, D. V., & Santos, V. P.. (2023). Energy crisis, water enclosure and resistance: the challenge of building political-epistemic communities. Revista Brasileira De História, 43(92), 29-46. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-93472023v43n92-04
• 10
   The original expression from Brazil in fact refers to a sweet made of whole cane sugar, known as rapadura.