Gone with the Wind

I’ve been back in Brazil for about a month already after spending three months in California. As soon as I got here I got swept up in activity, especially at the Daime church, where it looks like I will be becoming the new president. We just finished our feitio and I will soon share about my experiences during the week, which took place over Easter, but now here’s what I wrote about my reactions landing in Ceará after being gone for a spell. A lot can happen in three months.

I had gotten a window seat on my last flight from Recife to Fortaleza and was enjoying the green landscape of the Northeast of Brazil, despite severe drought and lack of rain. I started noticing strange markings in the land, which from my high altitude took on the shape of angular spirals, little squares cut out of the vegetation trailed by spiraling thin lines angling out to the main road, and many of them! I started seeing lots of these dotting the landscape and began wondering where we were flying over, because I didn’t see any towns nearby. Then I started seeing that as we flew a bit further, there were what looked like fields of white windmills, and I recognized that we were actually about to fly over Canoa Quebrada, where I live. I started recognizing the layout, the river mouth, and the woods where our land is, where the lake is totally dried up still, and the unstoppable, spreading advancement of these giant, white, rotating beasts all over the landscape like a fungus. I looked back and saw that these markings were clearings where they would soon be building more of these windmills, called eolicas or wind farms, collectively, and they projected out across the land as far as I could see even from up in the sky.

Construction started for thirteen of these humongous beasts near the Eco Aldeia Flecha da Mata, our center about five minutes from Canoa, right after we bought the land a few years ago. I remember crying when I came back from California one year after they had turned them on, and we could hear the noise and see them clearly. We shouldn’t have to wait for all kinds of environmental impact studies to recognize the ugly, aggressive colonial spirit that continues to go unchecked all over the globe, particularly in less affluent parts of the world. In fact I question the use of the term “post colonial,” because what I observe is that there has never been a break from the colonial period, nor especially a colonial consciousness. It has continued and continues to this day all over the globe. It is a fundamental lack of respect for life, or perhaps a lack of understanding of what life even is. How else can one justify building multiple 500 foot towers all over a landscape inhabited by people that do not want them there, who suffer from their presence, and who do not receive any benefits from them, and this is of course only one example. This monotonous, monstrous spread all across the land wreaks of manifest destiny right in our back yard, and here it marches onward in 2016. At least I got to know Canoa Quebrada before this crusade of industrial dominance disguised as environmental progress began. I have a lovely photo of the beach off to the north and the oceanic horizon that Fabio took back in 2005 or 2006 when we were here visiting. No wind farms. Just pure, wild nature. Now as I look out my window at night in that direction there’s a constellation of blinking red lights, too numerous to count.

The eolicas are a perfect example of the usual greedy, sinister motives which govern capitalism hidden in an attractive, convincing package, because they are coming to represent the new age as symbols of progress in the quest for sustainability and more responsible choices about the environment, perfect for convincing investors and government officials, but try telling that to people who live in a small community right underneath them, where they of course took out every tree surrounding their bases and created a huge complex right in the middle of a large wooded area where people still hunt and fish. Wind is free and clean, right? We like the idea, the gimmick. What they don’t show is the environmental impact that the turbines are actually having on the ground, how its messing with the landscape in extreme ways. They filled in some of the natural springs in the area to build their complex and not surprisingly its been years now since there’s been a lake. Of course it hasn’t been raining, either, but flattening out a large surface area to build giant windmills on top of natural springs can’t help matters. I’m finding now that there’s plenty of evidence that these wind farms don’t even reduce CO2 emissions because due to the changing nature of wind they have to be backed up 24h/day by generators to keep them going! Most of the ones by the Eco Aldeia are not even working now because the companies can’t afford to keep them going, but there they are towering over the disempowered population, which wasn’t going to receive a single benefit from the energy anyway, and the environmental damage has been done.

As I was driving by one of the industrial campuses nearby the other day on my way to visit some friends in Quixaba, I thought about Alice in Wonderland, me and my four wheel drive Pajero dwarfed by these towering, mostrous pin wheels, surreal in their height, girth and quantity. Whereas from the sky they had looked like tiny dandelions dotting the landscape so that it took a minute to recognize what I was seeing, from the ground it was as if I had been shrunk and could any minute be attacked by a giant spider or an ant. I think the message from Lewis Carroll’s book is appropriate in this case as well. We must try to know ourselves, and part of this is tuning into our own instincts and beliefs, sorting through the manipulative messages all around us from beings which don’t necessarily have our best interests in mind. I don’t have to be an expert on energy to know that I find this general onslought of construction of these windmills a huge mistake, representing a huge lack of respect for human life as well as the environment. The speed at which these towers are being built, and the frequency with which we pass their obstructive motorcades on the highway as they truck them up here one after the other, suggests to me that the interests behind them are trying to build as much of them as possible before public opinion, not to mention the law, catches up with them. Unfortunately it also seems like public opinion far and wide has been mostly responding positively, embracing the idea of renewable energy, and the false image of progress that is so easily transmited all over the globe.

Another shock awaiting me as on my return was that the land next to our friend Beto’s property, where we hold our feitios and which hosts an eco-camping area and several residents in back, but which is still mostly forested, had been completely deforested as the owners are preparing to build condos there. My friend Mariela, Beto’s partner, had written to me about it, but I wasn’t prepared for the site of it, the bald, hot dryness of it, and the apocalyptic landscape it now is. Beto’s land has a kitchen and bathroom area constructed with superadobe, grey water filtration and other permacultural practices, a pizzaria in the front that employs a rotating crew of young people who come through from all over the world, and in the back is our Santo Daime feitio house. Before this land had been comfortably embraced by vegetation all along that side, fruit trees and animals abounding. Now it feels quite exposed, and as Mariela lamented, soon there will be no peace when they start construction there, as well. She said that when they were working to take down all of those trees, the workers started coming next door to rest in the shade of the trees there, because there was no more on their side, and it’s hot here! Ironic isn’t it?

When I was home in California my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and had major surgery to remove the tumor and any chances of it spreading. The surgery was successful but she still has to undergo a round of chemo, so we’re all preparing for that and hoping that it goes smoothly and doesn’t make her too sick, though she will most likely lose her hair. As hard as it is to face, we all know that hair is not nearly as important as life and health, so she’s facing it all bravely, and then of course it will grow back. I couldn’t help drawing parallels between these changing situations, and even though all of this destruction and construction seems so permanent and overwhelming, there is comfort in knowing that at the end of the day, Nature reigns supreme, and Nature’s way is to grow back, as well. Like the infinite Mother that she is, we are in her hands, and as a species we are simply passing through our developmental stages. She’s in charge and she will always grow back, so that even some day when we’re all just mere flickers of light in the sky, at least we’ll be able to look back down on a shiny blue and green earth smiling up at us, content to have known us, but relieved that we’re gone.