Participating in the 23rd edition of the International Paraty Literary Party (Flip), the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, criticized the licensing PL and shared memories from her trajectory in defense of the forest.
On the night of Friday (1st), the table the place of the forest left crowded the main stages of Flip. In the matrix auditorium, the minister was received with long applause by the audience standing. In the auditorium of the square, where there was live broadcast by the big screen, she was applauded several times during her participation.
“Environmental licensing is the main vertebra of environmental protection in Brazil. I can’t see how we will be able to achieve the CO₂ emission reduction goals if licensing is mutilated and disfigured, as it is being in PL [do Licenciamento]in the way it was approved in Congress, ”lamented the minister about the Bill (PL) 2.159/21which deals with the rules of environmental licensing and has been called PL of devastation by environmentalists.
Sent to presidential sanction, the bill simplifies procedural procedures, with the creation of new types of environmental licenses, and the reduction of analysis deadlines.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has until the 8th to sanction or veto the final text that the House of Representatives approved on the last day 17.
“I can not imagine how we will reset deforestation in 2030. We have already achieved good results, we reduced, in these two and a half years, deforestation by 46% in the Amazon, 25% in the Cerrado, 77% in the Pantanal, and a reduction in the global average in the country of 32%. I can not see how we can continue to achieve these results if the PL is maintained under the conditions in which it was approved.
One of the devices of the approved PL warns Marina, establishes that each municipality and each state may establish the licensing rules and typologies.
“Do you think nature changes because it has changed the mayor’s ideology or because it has increased the ambition of investors? Nature laws do not change due to our interests. And technically, scientifically, there is no way to make a different typology.”
“The river that is contaminated with heavy metal in Minas Gerais is the same that will be contaminated in Espírito Santo,” exemplified the minister.
For her not only vetoes are not enough, there needs to be a measure to replace changes in legislation. The possibilities, according to Marina, would be a provisional measure or a bill.
The minister argued that the country’s economic development can happen without the destruction of biomes.
“When you show that deforestation fell 46%, agribusiness grew 15%, per capita income increased by 11%and employment has increased to a situation of almost full employment, what is the conclusion you arrive? You don’t have to destroy to grow and develop.”
Literature
Asked by the table mediator, journalist Aline Midlej, about the influence of literature on her career and for collective environmental awareness, Marina remembered her grandmother: illiterate woman who had privileged intelligence, said the minister.
“My father knew how to read, did until the third year [primário] before going to Acre as a rubber soldier. He read a Cordel literature leaflet twice and my grandmother decorated. She knew a lot of decorated things. ”
“And she sang to me:
‘Marina was a very rich and polite girl,
His father was a baron of a wealthy family,
But she loved Alonso who had nothing. ‘ I felt Marina herself, you know? Cordel’s literature brought me a playful world and was of great stimulus. I always play, I was illiterate until I was 16, but I was PhD to know narrative, ”said the minister.
She also revealed one of the stories of cordel literature that was part of this incentive, the duel between two singers: a literate from the city and a countryman from Caatinga. They are Romano and Ignatius of Catingueira. The countryman begins by winning the duel, but at one point his opponent changes the motto of singing.
“When you see you will lose, Roman changes to talk about the field of science. [Inácio] He says ‘if the knot in the hammer would see me untie him, but as science gave, sing only I shut down’. And it lowered my head and lost the duel and the whole hinterland was very outraged because there had been a cheat. And I cried and, if you realized, I still get emotional to this day because Ignatius lost, ”he said.
“And then I said, Grandma, why did he lose? And she said: my daughter, it was because he is illiterate. And I said: I don’t want to be illiterate,” he finished with his embargoed voice.
Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, participates in the 23rd Paraty International Literary Party, in the Matrix Auditorium – ROVENA ROSA/AGENCY BRAZIL
Dystopian moment
According to the minister, politics currently lives a dystopian moment in the country.
“Unfortunately, as it says [Zygmunt] Bauman, politics has been trapped by the system and as he says, if politics is just to gather people, to do more of the same – are his words – what does politics serve? ”
“Politics is not to gather people to do more of the same, because otherwise it becomes merely repetition. Of course things need to stabilize. The new is not created on top of the new. Biology teaches that something happens to preserve something. But there are times when it takes to break paradigms,” he said.
COP 30
For the minister, multilateralism has to be strengthened during COP 30, as well as an effort for agreed decisions to be credible.
“On the other hand, COP 30 has no alternative but, as Ambassador Correa do Lago says, to make a big task force. A joint effort from 196 countries that, by consensus, has to decide that from now on there is nothing more to delay.”
“COP 30 happens in a highly challenging geopolitical context, as we are all observing, where the largest war and economic power on the planet [Estados Unidos] He leaves the Paris agreement and decides not only to support war wars, but also makes tariff wars, ”he said. She assesses that these elements make this context even harder.
The minister stressed that the public and private sectors need to make investments that enable the implementation of the measures already compacted between countries to bar the overall increase in temperature. The value of US $ 1.3 trillion is the value that called developed countries need to guarantee developing countries in developing actions to combat climate emergencies.
“Amazing, we can’t get $ 1.3 trillion, but the world continues to invest directly and indirectly in fossil activities, between $ 5 and 7 trillion in activities that are carbon-intensive. It’s a very unequal fight,” he said.
The minister defends a fair and planned transition. “It’s not easy, it’s not magic, so we have argued that COP 30 must go out with a mandated group to map the path to the end of fossil fuel, deforestation and viable $ 1.3 trillion to help develop developing countries.”
“When we do not prepare to change, we are changed. And we are already being changed by climate emergency. What happened in Rio Grande do Sul is changing us. What happens when the river dries in the Amazon, is changing us. When the Pantanal catches fire, when, per year, 500 thousand people die only with heat waves, we have to plan the change before being abruptly,” Marina concluded.
*The reporter and photographer traveled at the invitation of Motiva, sponsor and official Flip Mobility Partner 2025.
