THE STRUGGLE FOR
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN BRAZIL
The final session of the conference was The Cry of Creation: Creativity in the Church. The Bishop of the Amazon, the Rt Rev’d Marinez Rosa Dos Santos Bassotto, spoke movingly about the impact of climate change and deforestation in her unique diocese and offers further insight here. Throughout the Anglican Communion we are reflecting on the challenges of being God's Church for God’s World. We want to look to the future and be a Church that responds by words and actions. That response needs to be deeply rooted in our local reality. My local reality in Brazil is being greatly impacted by policies aimed at symbolically and physically crushing the structures of protection and environmental
care and the rights of the most vulnerable populations at a time when Covid-19 has deepened social gaps and inequalities. The Brazilian government had begun deregulating environmental policies, but this process has accelerated during the pandemic. The changes include laws that once curbed environmental crimes and brought punishments to those who committed them. More than 700 legal measures have been passed that impact the environment, and many others will follow. They serve private interests such as agribusiness, loggers, and mining companies. One example is Bill 490, which amends the legislation on the demarcation of indigenous lands and can extinguish communities originating in various parts of the country. The government’s attitude to Amazonia and other important biomes is not focused on the preservation of life. Rather it is the complete opposite - greed and extraction, which uses nature only as a generating source of profit. This leads to enormous inequalities, causes environmental degradation and devastation, killing fauna, flora, biodiversity and human life.
Rt Rev’d Marinez Rosa Dos Santos Bassotto, Bishop of the Amazon
The dismantling of environmental protection bodies, the weakening of surveillance, and socio-environmental actions, the systematic deregulation of environmental protection, the successive attempts to minimize the
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