Why the Global Climate Agenda Cannot Save the Brazilian Amazon

The future of the Amazon rainforest is at the center of climate change discussions after an ultra-right-wing administration took power in Brazil in January 2019. The illegal use of the Amazon lands and the raise of murders of indigenous activists in the region are completely ignored by the new government. This paper presents a genealogy of different political uses of the Brazilian Amazon territory. It uses Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of “Landschaft” (landscape) and the historical approach of the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha to reflect on connections between science, aesthetics, and politics and to open up our understanding of the present and future of the Brazilian Amazon territory. It demonstrates that the colonial patriarchal exploitation of biodiversity, culture and territory is intrinsic to all past and present projects to govern the Amazon. The paper proceeds in three segments, or types of “Landschaft”: These segments reveal, in three specific moments, three different projects to govern and use the Amazon territory: a military, a democratic and a climate project. By depicting these “Landschaften”, the paper questions the territorial interventions in the Amazon region and shows how these political projects perpetuate a colonial legacy and an ontological idea of nature, progress and development. It concludes that this frame based on concepts of growth as progress has limited our imaginaries and has institutionalized the exploitation of nature and populations based on national development promises.