In October 2000, I published an article entitled "A Internacionalização da Amazônia" (The Internationalization of the Amazon) in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. In it I repeated my response to a question posed by a US student in September of that year during a State of the World Forum event held in New York.
Seated on the floor in front of the table I occupied, he stood up to ask his question. He did not sit down and waited for me to stand up and when I began by saying that I was opposed to the idea, he continued, "I don't want your answer as a Brazilian but, rather, as a humanist."
I reoriented my reply and said that as a human being I was in favor of the internationalization of the Amazon, but only after we also internationalized everything that is important for humanity.
The oil reserves should be internationalized because they are as important today as the rainforest will be tomorrow. The nuclear arsenals should not stay in the hands of the United States and the few other countries; they should be internationalized.
The city of New York itself, headquarters of the United Nations, should not belong only to the United States. Speculative financial capital, which causes hunger and unemployment and destroys entire countries with damages greater than the burning of the Amazon, should not remain in individual hands either.
I defended the idea that even the principal museums of the world should be international. After all, they are the guardians of humanity's cultural heritage just as much as the Amazon is of its natural heritage.
Even the children of the world should be internationalized, which would prevent some of them from dying or working just because they happened to be born in a poor country.
And I concluded by saying that, as a humanist, I defended the internationalization of the world, but as long as the world treated us as Brazilians, the Amazon should be ours. And only ours.
For some reason that I cannot explain, the article was a favorite of readers and began to circulate on the Internet. It was spontaneously translated into several languages and was included in Professor Carlos Figueiredo's anthology Cem Discursos Históricos Brasileiros (One Hundred Historic Brazilian Speeches).
The Internet versions, however, contain some mistakes: that the event took place in a university when in fact the location was a ballroom in the New York Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue. Only in November 2007 was I invited to speak about the matter at the University of Texas - Pan American.
That the article was published in US newspapers after having been ignored by Brazilian newspapers, when in truth it was O Globo that published it. Even that the author was Chico Buarque - I would be extremely pleased if I could exchange the authorship of all my articles for that of any one of the beautiful songs that he has composed.
In my travels in Brazil and abroad people often ask me if I am, in fact, the author of that speech.
A few weeks ago I went to visit the Brazilian base in Antarctica. During a stopover in Punta Arenas - on the shore of the Straits of Magellan at the extreme south of the continent - Major Brigadier Intendant Eliseu Mendes Barbosa, of the Aeronautics Command, called me to the hotel lobby to show me the porter, who was speaking about the article without having the slightest idea that the author was a guest in the hotel.
As soon as I had returned to Brazil, a radio station in France put me on the air, live, to discuss the article with the radio host and people commenting over the Internet.
The TV host Ana Maria Braga read the article at the beginning of her program on the National Day of the Environment. The actor Antônio Abujamra also read it in the middle of his play "A Voz do Provocador" (The voice of the provocateur).
The fact is that an article published one certain day in O Globo traveled around the world, thanks to the Internet and to some readers who decided to take the time to share it with other people, creating a process of successive reproductions like a chain reaction.
That power of the Internet only goes to show that the world really needs to be internationalized. But, until this happens, the Amazon is ours! Only ours!
Cristovam Buarque is a professor at the University of Brasília
interesting
song for today
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