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Neste blog o tema do colapso do homem moderno é, por assim dizer, recorrente e certamente influenciado por muitas leituras, desde The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Donella H et al., 1972) até à Teoria Ator-Rede de Bruno Latour, Michel Callon e John Law, passando pela desmontagem dos mitos em volta do homem moderno e das suas ciências e utopias políticas realizada por Jean-Francois Lyotard. Por um lado, a civilização industrial assente no uso de fontes abundantes de energia, altamente calóricas, facilmente transportáveis e baratas (carvão, petróleo, gás natural) ao longo de dois séculos de extraordinário crescimento e desenvolvimento tecnológico, encontra-se hoje confrontada com os limites ao crescimento impostos quer pelo fim do acesso fácil àquelas três energias fósseis, quer pelos efeitos da queima destes fósseis na composição da atmosfera. Por outro lado, a perceção de que a ação humana, sobretudo das sociedades mais ricas, mais produtivas, mais cultas e tecnologicamente mais avançadas, poderá estar na origem duma extinção em massa da vida existente no planeta, precedida por crises violentas e mesmo colapsos de cidades, países e regiões geográficas inteiras é, em si mesma, um desafio à qualidade e autoridade da racionalidade do homem moderno (1).
Perante este desafio sem precedentes, dada a sua escala planetária e a destruição dos equilíbrios naturais causados pelo homem moderno naquela fina película de vida que recobre o planeta (a que Latour chama zona crítica), parece haver dois tipos de resposta dominante: a de curto e médio prazo, que passa pela chamada agenda ecológica, cujos pontos críticos são a decisão de abandonar as energias fósseis e o controlo e limitação dos acessos aos recursos naturais disponíveis (pela via da monitorização e de leis de restrição às capturas e extrações); e a de médio e longo prazo, que passa pela descoberta de novos continentes de energia e matérias primas, a que Rory Rowan chama futurismo colonial.
Embora a espuma dos dias nos entretenha com futebol e coscuvilhice politiqueira, a verdade é que o nosso país tem vindo a apostar nas duas vias de mitigação potencial de uma crise que se aproxima com a força dum maremoto, seja pela aposta nas energias eólica e voltaica, nos metais raros (lítio, por exemplo) e no hidrogénio, seja, mais silenciosamente, pela preparação de uma nova aventura colonial precedida dum período de descobertas e exploração. Estas duas novas epopeias em surdina são, por um lado, a conquista do espaço, desde logo pela necessidade urgente de o libertar de uma crescente poluição aeroespacial, e a conquista da profundidade oceânica, onde se espera encontrar um novo e imenso manancial de espécies vivas, de minerais e de novas matérias primas (2). Interessa notar, desde já, que o arquipélago dos Açores, a par da extensão previsível da Platafoma Continental portuguesa, são o novo mare nostrum e a nova terra incognita que poderão oferecer ao nosso país uma segunda grande oportunidade de vencer a sua atual pequenez e pobreza relativas.
A grande dúvida reside, porém, na qualidade destas estratégias de mitigação. Haverá alguma consistência nos seus pressupostos, ou não passarão duma fuga em frente onde se misturam business as usual, especulação e wishful thinking?
NOTAS
1. 2020: The Year Things Started Going Badly Wrong
Posted on December 23, 2020 by Gail Tverberg
The economy is like a down escalator that citizens of the world are trying to walk upward on. At first the downward motion of the escalator is almost imperceptible, but gradually it gets to be greater and greater. Eventually the downward motion becomes almost unbearable. Many citizens long to sit down and take a rest.
In fact, a break, like the pandemic, almost comes as a relief. There is suddenly a chance to take it easy; not drive to work; not visit relatives; not keep up appearances before friends. Government officials may not be unhappy either. There may have been demonstrations by groups asking for higher wages. Telling people to stay at home provides a convenient way to end these demonstrations and restore order.
But then, restarting doesn’t work. There are too many broken pieces of the economy. Too many bankrupt companies; too many unemployed people; too much debt that cannot be repaid. And, a virus that really doesn’t quite go away, leaving people worried and unwilling to attempt to resume normal activities.
Some might describe the energy story as a “diminishing returns” story, but it’s really broader than this. It’s a story of services that we expect to continue, but which cannot continue without much more energy investment. It is also a story of the loss of “economies of scale” that at one time helped propel the economy forward.
(...)
With diminishing returns everywhere and inadequate sources of very inexpensive energy to keep the system going, major parts of the world economic system appear headed for collapse. There doesn’t seem to be any way to keep the world economy growing rapidly enough to offset the down escalator effect.
Citizens have not been aware of how “close to the edge” we have been. Low energy prices have been deceptive, but this is what we should expect with collapse. (See, for example, Revelation 18: 11-13, telling about the lack of demand for goods of all kinds when ancient Babylon collapsed.) Low prices tend to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They also tend to discourage high-priced alternatives. Unfortunately, all the wishful thinking of the World Economic Forum and others advocating a Green New Deal does not change the reality of the situation.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/12/23/2020-the-year-things-started-going-badly-wrong/
2. “Beyond Colonial Futurism: Portugal’s Atlantic Spaceport and the Neoliberalization of Outer Space”
In November 2016 Portugal’s Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education announced plans to open the Atlantic Spaceport, a logistics site for commercial space launches. Located in the Azores, a mid-Atlantic archipelago and autonomous region of Portugal, the Atlantic Spaceport is the lynchpin of national and European attempts to make the country an “innovation hub” for the fast-growing commercial space sector. With these plans, the Portuguese state, and its backers at the European Space Agency, are seeking to position the country as a player in the neo-liberalization of outer space, whereby the governance of space is restructured around the growth of private industry and a gradual shift from space exploration to space exploitation.
Understood within the context of Portugal’s post-financial crisis economic policy, the Atlantic Spaceport takes its place amongst other attempts to stimulate growth by drawing on the country’s colonial territories and relationships with former colonies—from “golden visa” programs offering residency to wealthy Brazilians investing in Portuguese real estate and courting investment from oil-rich Angolans, to the hotly contested plans to offer deep-sea mining concessions of the Azores’ coast. However, in official discourses Portugal’s venture into the commercial space sector is framed in terms of international cooperation, scientific collaboration, and economic development with the Atlantic Spaceport, positioning the country as a geopolitical pivot between Global North and Global South, with its colonial history figured as the launchpad for techno-futurist imaginaries of human life in space.
This lecture seeks to use the Atlantic Spaceport as a lens through which to explore the deep entanglement of colonial imaginaries and neoliberal governance in the context of European space exploration, rather than in the more familiar setting of American final-frontierism. It argues that only by understanding the ways in which contemporary visions of off-Earth futures are constitutively bound up with patterns of colonial thinking, capitalist accumulation, and neoliberal governance is it possible to imagine these futures otherwise and to develop modes of thought and practice whereby the promise of space exploration as a vector of freedom and justice – both on and off-Earth – might be realized.
—in e-flux lectures: Rory Rowan, “Beyond Colonial Futurism: Portugal’s Atlantic Spaceport and the Neoliberalization of Outer Space”
Published on April 18, 2018
Beyond Colonial Futurism
https://www.e-flux.com/video/198108/e-flux-lectures-rory-rowan-beyond-colonial-futurism-portugal-s-atlantic-spaceport-and-the-neoliberalization-of-outer-space/
Portugal Space
https://ptspace.pt/pt/home/
AIR CENTRE
https://www.aircentre.org/events/
Space Resources
https://space-agency.public.lu/en/space-resources.html
Estrutura de Missão para a Extensão da Plataforma Continental (EMEPC)
https://www.emepc.pt/
