The Last Gasps of the Old World Order in Brazil as NM Shows How the New World Starts

The air in Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, is so befouled by smoke, soot and ash from immense fires in the Amazon basin that daylight is often eclipsed. The toxic fumes come from fires set purposefully by the Brazilian government of extremist authoritarian conservative President Jair Bolsonaro to create more farmland from the rain forest to grow soy, the country’s principle export crop, and raise cattle. The blazing Amazon is yet another gruesome symptom of the death throes of the old world order that’s hell bent, it seems, on destroying the world itself through the hot smoldering of climate change and its denial.

Everywhere you see it now, the old order hanging on by its claws — the hybrid beast of sexism, racism, elitism, homophobia, isolationism, extreme nationalism, anti-environmentalism in the form of rank commercial propaganda and a species of rapacious capitalism that is willing to commit any dirty means to achieve its prime directive: amassing of wealth for the wealthy.

We saw shadows of this here in New Mexico for almost a decade under the radical conservatism embodied in the policies and callousness of the administration of Susana Martinez. We saw the largest jet fuel spill in America at Kirtland Airforce Base, near the sweet spot of Albuquerque’s aquifer, all but ignored for close to a decade. We saw our fragile but thoroughly functional behavioral health system gutted and then pawned off to outsider for-profit providers from Arizona who abandoned us as soon as they saw there wasn’t enough money to be made here to warrant their fidelity. We saw the Oil Conservation Division (OCD) stripped of its power to fine oil and gas operations that violate the Oil and Gas Act. We saw the state’s enormous potential for solar and wind power put on hold for eight long years. We saw increased fracking around the sacred grounds of Chaco Canyon with no opposition from state government. We saw exploitation trump conservation every time when it came to profiting from natural resources on public lands. And we witnessed a serious though stalled effort to turn southern New Mexico into a national nuclear landfill, storing spent nuclear fuel rods in the state’s oil patch.

As hundreds of fires rage in the Amazon rainforest, crippling its biodiversity, predictions of drastically reduced rainfall in the Midwest of North America accompany an increased awareness of the dangers of isolationist thinking. The natural world knows no national boundaries. Sovereignty is not part of the water cycle. As it turns out, the Amazon rainforest sends vast amounts of atmospheric water north into our country, where it keeps dryland farming in the Midwest from desiccation.

Bolsonaro is the epitome of the old order gone bad, a militarized version of Trumpism with shades of murderous Pinochet-style state terror that makes one shudder. Purposefully burning the rain forest is a crime against humanity excused as a right of Brazilian sovereignty. Bolsonaro’s nationalism — his view of environmentalists as colonialists threatening Brazil’s independence, combined with his social bigotry and propaganda, painting liberals and populist workers groups as terrorists — makes us realize once again the huge odds against creating an international consensus in the brave new world of climate change. Having a diplomatically tone-deaf president like Donald Trump has left the United States without any influence on the international stage. And the void is being filled by the French and their president Emmanuel Macron, who was one of the few world leaders to declare the arsonist fires in Brazil an “international crisis.”

Where are the models of how to repair the damage of the Toxic Right and move forward toward environmental sanity? We must find them anywhere we can.

And probably the best place to look for international solutions, unlikely as it seems, is in the courage and action of local communities and state governments around the world and in the United States. And according to many of us, including the distinguished Conservation Voters of New Mexico (CVNM), our state is moving from an environmental backwater to once again assuming a role of pragmatic environmental activism with people of conscience who care about the health of the world and their neighbors, not some miserly and greedy ideology that looks at poor people as “expenses” rather than as full human beings.

The CVNM, in its 2019 Conservation Scorecard out last week, gave Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham a grade of A for her work in developing, sponsoring and signing crucial environmental bills into law at this year’s legislative session. She had to start filling the void left by the Martinez administration as fast as she could. And during the frantic first days of her administration, she issued an executive order aligning New Mexico with the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which included a directive to eliminate methane emissions at all oil and gas drilling sites.

She signed and advocated for the Energy Transition Act, which requires the state to produce and use 100% carbon free electricity by 2045. Along with giving the Oil Conservation Division back its power to levy fines, she signed into law an Outdoor Recreation Division bill to give regular folks a leg up in disputes with corporations and a hostile federal government in land use and resource disputes. She also came out strongly against a proposal by Holtec International to store the nation’s 80,000 to 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel rods, containing uranium and plutonium, in New Mexico. The plan was also opposed by New Mexico cattle growers and by the oil and gas industry.

These are all important first moves in the early days of her administration. They aren’t quite a model for other places and leadership circles to follow. New Mexico’s large family of environmental activists will be watching eagerly early next year for the governor’s first, full package of environmental legislation. And hopes are high.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it