Hour after hour digital newspapers consult with anguish. The nuclear disaster in Japan is presented as a "death foretold." Imagine what it must feel that people from morning till night has lost everything and is trapped, surrounded by an invisible threat ... the dreaded radiation. How little seem the most modern and ingenious inventions when they do not work! The temples of consumption have been reduced to piles of rubble ... Abundant only sadness, despair, anger contained ... fear.
If there were any doubt, it is clear that we live in a real "risk society", as defined at industrial societies today the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. We walked on the edge of the abyss, thinking foolishly naive or is not going to happen. Too bad they need so much suffering and destruction to the irrationality of the growth model is exposed as a menacing core melt accident. And yet, not even all understand it. So many people are determined not to know and to prevent others from seeing the pathetic suicidal race to the bottom! We believe too much in the power of scientific-technological complex. It is normal, experts tell us their deep voices and assertive. And then, the precautionary principle is forgotten.
In this month of March, thousands of rural women demonstrated in six states in Brazil to demand an end to the mass poisoning of the fields with herbicides. Defend their work and their land, our common home we are destroying the web of life that tore and pollute without conscience that we belong to it and suffer the consequences. These women claim the right to grow healthy food and agro-ecologically, thus, not suffer, neither they nor their children, the effects of the use of pesticides always present in the "agribusiness." The technology of war is now applied in peacetime. The former agent nerve gases and burnt orange forests and bodies in Vietnam have become now on the basis of modern pesticides and herbicides. We are at war with the Earth and everything that is not speed, hyper-, quick profit and efficiency measured in money. The rest does not count, neither health nor safety, nor joy, nor life for present and future generations, human and nonhuman. How did we get this when just science and technology allow us to live better? We are led to believe that it is never enough. This is the mechanism of the consumer society.
The Greeks called hubris (excess) to megalomania, to pride, the pretension to surpass all limits. Sophocles represented the character of Ajax, who leads Athena to madness and death as punishment. In contemporary times, it manifests as excess consumption, hunger for profit and techno arrogance which claims to have everything under control when it knows only a fraction of their subject.
In this century, characterized by unprecedented ecological crisis, ecofeminism is the message of wise restraint, care, responsibility and empathy with others, human and nonhuman. Equality and eco-justice is their horizon. In these days when we hear such sad and disturbing, ecofeminism can be comfort and hope.
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