El Río de Violencia (The River of Violence)
The city of Río de Janiero, Brazil, is experiencing a vicious and violent crisis. Armed gangs have taken over the slums of the city, known as favelas. In 2009, it got so violent that favela gunmen shot down a police helicopter during a city level civil war. Drastic wealth separation and a history of dictatorship and political oppression contributes to this issue, but one of the main drivers of this crisis that I will be focusing on is the unstable weather patterns that are produced as a result of climate change in the Northeast region of Brazil, the Nordeste,
As stated in Christian Parenti's 2010 book, the Tropic of Chaos, Río "reveals how the climate crisis in the countryside is expressed as urban violence" (159). The land in the Nordeste used to be a place where farmers could live and support themselves as conditions were just right for farming and agricultural practices. Now, because of the effects the climate crisis has on weather patterns there, it is a drought stricken and flood wrought area from where subsistence farmers are forced to migrate because they cannot support themselves. To get by, these farmers move to places like Río de Janiero or São Paulo where they end up trapped in the impoverished favelas and get lured into the violent gang culture. In the words of Parenti, “it is a city produced by extreme weather elsewhere” (159).
During the 1800s up until the late 1870s, the Nordeste supported a coastal plantation economy and a cattle industry. Most of this ended in the late 1870s and early 1880s and drought spurred on the migration of the poor out of the area. In the 1940s, the favelas were built by these displaced workers. Fast forward thirty years, the “occurrence of climate related disasters [in this region] increased by 2.4 times between 1970 and 1999”, with the same rate of increase occurring between 2000 and 2005 (160). In 1940, fifteen percent of Brazil’s population lived in the cities. As of 2010, eighty percent of the population live in urban areas, and it will continue to grow as the climate continues to destabilize. This will lead to more overpopulation in the cities, increased poverty levels, and increased violence. According to the IPCC, “prolonged droughts in north-eastern Brazil have provoked rural-urban migration of subsistence farmers” (160). There is no question as to whether or not climate related issues have at least in part caused mass migration to the major cities of Brazil, and are a major contributor to the continuation of the massive separation of wealth and intense violence in Río.
The effects of climate change are not only dumped onto the natural world. They resonate like sound waves throughout all of humanity, as we as humans depend on the planet to give us what we need to survive. The conditions in Brazil are a small slice of the effects the climate crisis has on the socioeconomic world, and can function as a portal to the future and what it may look like if action to stop excess carbon emissions is not taken.
Comments
Post a Comment