Our Body of Evidence

Once again time has managed to slither by and here we are in June. When I opened my Wix account I was hoping to find that I had at least posted one more article since January, but no such luck. I am happy to report, however, that I had the good fortune to attend a workshop the other day which inspired me to write in hopes of sharing some of the information and inspiration I received with all of you. Ceará no Clima, (Ceará in the Climate,) an environmental education and political action organization here in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará, joined together representatives from several coastal communities as part of a larger movement focused on disseminating facts about the dangers of climate change and stimulating more civil action and exchange among community organizations in a one day workshop. There were nine of us participating from Canoa Quebrada and Estevão.

The corridor leading into Canto Verde, a small beach town a little over 20 miles from Canoa, is bordered by macaxeira plantations and family farms, and the town itself is way less touristy than ours, greeting us with the lure of simplicity and solitude, opening up into an idyllic stretch of beach. Inside the single structure community center was a large display about the local culture, the “labirintos” or hand made lace, arts & crafts made with coconut fronds, and a newspaper article about a seventy three day voyage that some local fishermen had made along the coast to Rio de Janeiro to protest the lack of regulation protecting their way of life. I was aware of other famous voyages like this one, the first made by Francisco de Nascimento or “Dragão do Mar,” (Dragon of the Sea,) from Canoa Quebrada, who in 1884 led an expedition to Rio which resulted in Ceará being the first state in the country to abolish slavery, a source of great pride here. The second was the famous sixty day voyage to Rio during World War Two in protest of the inhuman conditions which plagued, and continue to plague, northeastern fishermen and their families. Orson Welles was to make a film out of the expedition in 1941which was never completed, but the footage was made into a documentary entitled É Tudo Verdade, (It's All True.) I was impressed to learn about this third political voyage and asked several people in which year it had taken place because the article had no date, but no one knew, so after asking several times I dropped it.

Soon everyone arrived and after some breakfast, our friend Alexandre Araújo Costa from the state University of Ceará and one of the founders of Ceará no Clima and O Que Você Faria se Soubesse o Que eu Sei?, (What would you do if you knew what I know?) started the first lecture, a pointed and well honed argument for the existence and urgency of climate change. I had attended two other lectures with Alexandre prior and had the privilege of experiencing the evolving cogency of his argument. He started by pointing out that through his work he has come to focus on working with and educating "the people" rather than wasting too much time trying to get government attention as we are seeing more and more clearly where bureaucratic priorities are held. The data presented shows a steep pike in temperatures since the industrial revolution in relation to a trajectory going back to the last ice age, and in another graph, we saw the exponential acceleration of CO2 entering the atmosphere due to the burning of first wood, then coal, then petroleum and natural gas over the last two centuries. We have all heard by now that an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat, like a blanket, and Alexandre used this image of an accumulation of sheets effectively, as here in Ceará the temperature hovers around seventy five degrees at night. The temperature changes can seem mild and unimportant to a layman, even though scientists have established a threshold of safety which we are fast approaching, but when we put it in the perspective of our own bodies, the urgency becomes clearer. In celsius, a half-degree temperature change can be critical, and two degrees can mean the difference between life and death. The effects of all of this CO2 is also making the oceans more acidic, and recent attention to the acidity in our bodies and the popularity of alkaline diets which help restore our ph balance should also help bring the science home.

Next, another friend, Erica Pontes, a geographer and professor with the Secretary of Education for the State, gave a presentation on the history and formation of what is now Ceará. To everyone’s surprise the peaks and plateaus throughout the region, rather than having risen up somehow, have been left behind from the slow degradation of earth pulled by gravity, (what I refer to as "mama's hungry hug" when I teach body consciousness exercises,) and moved by the winds and rains towards the coast to form the sand dunes and beaches. I think everyone present had been under the impression that sand comes from the ocean, like sea-glass, but no, it is the fine result of hundreds of thousands of years of gravity's constant force and the resulting transformation from macro to micro. Although we all walked away joking that the main lesson from the day was “Where does sand come from?” Erica’s lecture was principally focused on the interconnectedness of us all, how what happens upstream affects those downstream, and how, although we all live in our individual communities, we are part of this larger collective picture that ties us together.

After lunch we were broken up randomly into groups for some participatory work. The day was hot, as days usually are here, and afternoon siestas are common, but we wasted no time getting back to task. We were divided into four groups of five people, given paper and colored pencils, and asked to create our ideal community together in twenty minutes, no easy feat, we discovered, in the time allotted. Group process is a whole study in itself, and there was little time to elaborate. After about fifteen minutes of talking about everything that’s wrong in our actual communities in the group I was in, we managed to map out something that sort of represented our shared values and dreams, and we were promptly called back together to present our results. All four groups, though our designs were vastly different on paper, had many things in common, such as a focus on integrated education, community based tourism as we all live in beautiful, small coastal towns, planting our own food, group work days, recycling programs, and the like.

After the presentations, all four communities were laid side by side in a row on the table and Erica began giving her professional critique. The first one was drawn as a perfect circle, and she pointed out that although it was very idyllic, it was rather isolated, and so she drew a bridge linking it to the next district so that along with valuing the town’s individuality, the people could benefit from more contact with their neighbors. She then pointed out that they would need educated professors to work in their progressive school, and that there was space in the next community to build a university, which she promptly sketched in and included another road to facilitate the commute. As she continued to make “improvements” like this, gaining steam, several people meandered over to the coffee table, some light chit chat erupted, and though most of us were still engaged with the process, we saw little need to stop her or question too much what she was doing, trusting that she had all of our best interests in mind, and after all, she was the “teacher.” She continued her trajectory, adding roads through the towns now, having reached the third community, and people were paying more attention, laughing at the prospect of a freeway through the picturesque dunes in town number three, but when she decided to draw in a zoo on the beach the gig was finally up. I was standing next to her so I grabbed her right hand before she could finish writing “Zoológico Municipal,” laughing and enjoying how easy a political intervention like this could suddenly be. Various people were still busy adding sugar to their coffee.

It was a brilliant, participatory enactment of social responsibility and the complexities that we are all up against, whether we realize it or not. Decisions are being made which affect every one of us all the time, often behind closed doors, with sophisticated, well developed strategies involved to keep us distracted or gain our trust in order for Big Business to get what they want. For me it was yet another wake up call and just the inspiration I needed to remember that I can make a difference and that showing up, though it may seem to be half the battle, is actually quite critical. Afterwards we were broken up into groups according to our real respective localities and given an opportunity to outline our potentialities and limitations. Considering all of the similarities and differences among our towns, there was a common affirmation that all of our communities are worth protecting and developing in the face of so much speculation and negligence. We closed for the day and headed out front to take a group photo. Painho, a man from Canto Verde who had led us throughout the day with popular music on his guitar, pointed out that the retired fishing boat that we were all climbing up on for the picture was THE jangada which, in 1993, traveled along the Northeast coast of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro for seventy three days manned by a team of local fishermen in protest of the encroachment of commercial fishing and in order to preserve their endangered way of life! We huddled together, smiling and content with our day together. The photo was snapped. And the struggle continues.

#cearanoclima #climatechange #ceara #canoaquebrada #cantoverde