Nathaniel Popkin, TO REACH THE SPRING
Nathaniel Popkin, EVERYTHING IS BORROWED
Mark Lyons, HOMING: A MEMOIR

[Q:] In the book, you highlight our complicity and potential for apathy, going on to write, “Not facing known and well-understood acts of destruction may be the moral failure of our time.” I turn one of your opening questions back to you. In face of the climate crisis, what is life worth?

[A:] Very clearly, we’ve allowed the market, the system of global capitalism, to establish the metrics for answering this question. But it doesn’t have to be that way, does it? And furthermore, what we take the question to mean—what is a human life worth?—can be challenged and changed. For all life and lives are connected. As biologists are increasingly coming to understand, beings spawn, grow, evolve, and adapt together in complicated webs of life and not—as we like to imagine—as discrete individuals. We are at stake to one another. Let us, then, reconfigure our approach to the question, “What is life worth?” For what do we mean by life?

Popkin cites capitalism as “invading every aspect of life on earth” where green shoots of concern and demand for action are smothered by an unending torrent of disinformation from powerful multinationals. These are led by the fossil fuel industry and supported by enabling politicians, that cast doubt on the very reality of the crisis facing our planet.

​Drawing on his years of experience as a climate activist and referencing past world crises from the bubonic plague of the dark ages to our Covid-19 pandemic, Popkin shows how challenging it is to achieve consensus on climate action and then shows us why we must.

​In the Amazon rainforest of northwest Brazil, the Paiter Suruí indigenous people had lived without interaction with Europeans until 1969, adapting with the flora and fauna of their forest home for thousands of years. European contact inevitably brought disease, eviscerating the Paiter Suruí population, which dropped from 10,000 to 240. Lumber mills and ranchers moved in. Government policy encouraged economic growth (and return on investment) at all costs.
 
Facing possible extinction from modernity as destruction, Almir Suruí, the dynamic Paiter Suruí leader, appealed to modernity as hope to save his people’s forest home. In 2007 he convinced the engineers behind Google Earth to create a means for tracking and reporting forest loss. The audacity of the project gave the Paiter Suruí enough notoriety to take the upper hand in the fight, and the tool engaged young members of the tribe in the work of progress. The larger challenge was to permanently protect the rainforest while providing an economic alternative to logging or ranching (and for the young people a reason to stay in the village). Collaborating with various international organizations, Suruí enrolled the rainforest in the United Nations-sponsored REDD+ program, a marketplace for carbon credits. A corporation needing to offset its carbon dioxide emissions would pay the Paiter Suruí to maintain and enhance the rainforest as a carbon sink.

the Paiter Suruí carbon offset credit project became the target of a powerful Catholic Church–backed indigenous group, CIMI, whose leaders attacked the project as commodification of nature. Though they had the same goal to save the rainforest as Almir Suruí, the CIMI activists saw the project squarely as an example of modernity as destruction, the wealthy earning on the backs of the poor.
 
The project now weakened by heightening protest, a rival leader, Henrique Suruí, accused Almir Suruí of corruption.… Then miners discovered gold and diamonds in the ground beneath the forest. The result was a free-for-all.
 
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí issued a panicked call for help. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks entered and left the forest filled with lumber, the bounty of nearly 1,500 acres of tropical rainforest. The situation was dire: “Either one collaborates, or they put a gun to our heads!”…
 
In his cry of alarm, Almir Suruí was trying to seize the world’s attention, to make us act—immediately—while it was still possible to define the exact nature of the crime. The gun is at all our heads, he said. You living in comfort haven’t yet heeded the warning, so let me repeat it. He wrote, “The implications are terrible. In addition to environmental damage (and the challenge to our way of life), these invasions directly endanger our families and our children.”
 
Did anyone outside of the relatively small community of global environmental activists hear Almir Suruí’s declaration of sacrifice? Though his plea appeared on a few websites, the response was negligible. Indeed, when I search the Internet for any indication Suruí has been heeded, I come up with nothing. To my horror, the invasion goes on—today it continues at a much greater scale under the orders of right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a committed political enemy of indigenous people. There seems to be no one in Brazil’s demonstrably corrupt and incompetent government to stop it. The genocide against the forest was the kind of injustice and aggression that had spurred me to action so long ago, inspired by the simple idea that Suruí had so succinctly expressed: my future is the same as yours.