COP 30 or COP 525?

What will be at stake at COP 30, as it was at previous conferences and will be at future ones, is the lack of political will.

3 NOVEMBER 2025,

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

COP 30 is the official name of the UN climate change conference being held in Belém, Brazil, from 10 to 21 November. But indigenous peoples around the world have for years been assigning it another number more in line with their historical experience of the issues being discussed. The date is that of the arrival of European colonisers in their territories. In the case of Brazil, 1500.

The problem of climate change began with colonialism and capitalism and continues to this day. It will not be solved as long as colonialism and capitalism dominate our lives. The ecological crisis is the other side of the social and political crisis.

It is not worth giving figures because they are a way of neutralising revolt, whether they are figures on deforestation, the weight of plastics in the oceans, the genocide in Gaza or the regular killings of impoverished populations in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Figures are abstract entities, introduced for the sole purpose of counting. The objects we count (dead people, felled trees) are not figures, they are unique beings that we reduce to a figure in order to accommodate them in a conception of reality that does not change, whatever the figure may be.

Just as prisoners are not numbers, even though they have a number. We have become accustomed to designating horror by quantity in order to live with it more easily, that is, without having to change the political, economic and cultural conceptions that systematically produce it. Whoever does the calculations is not counted.

Depending on the circumstances, COP 30 will be an orgy or a war of present and future numbers. In the end, there will be winning numbers and losing numbers so that everything remains the same. Numbers are only useful for small changes that do not alter the essentials. And even in this area, pessimism about COP 30 is justified. Donald Trump's environmental denialism has caused an incalculable civilisational setback by forcing all countries rich in natural resources (and impoverished in health, education, human security, etc.) to proclaim their sovereignty over them and demonstrate it through more intense exploitation. The reaction to Trump had the perverse result of further weakening the international cooperation that would be necessary to address the impending ecological collapse.

What will be at stake at COP 30, as it was at previous conferences and will be at future ones, is the lack of political will to face this truth that is easy to formulate but very difficult to put into practice: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. The difficulty is also easy to identify, but very difficult to address: capitalism and colonialism, which have dominated the global economy and society since the 16th century, have become incompatible with the survival of human life and life in general on planet Earth. The incompatibility is also easy to formulate: for Eurocentric modernity, constituted mainly by capitalism and colonialism, nature belongs to us and, as such, we can dispose of it freely. Disposing of it implies the power to destroy it.

For capitalism and colonialism, there is a radical separation between humanity and nature. The Cartesian philosophy that presides over this duality establishes an absolute separation and hierarchy between human beings and nature, just as it separates the mind from the body. While human beings are res cogitans, thinking substances, nature is res extensa, extensive and impenetrable substances.

As God is human thought about the infinite, human beings are immensely closer to God than nature. Human beings are truly worthy of the dignity that God has bestowed upon them to the extent that they denature themselves. Herein lies the root of the abysmal line that characterises modern domination, the possibility of absolute dualisms and, with it, the impossibility of holistic thinking. Nature is subject to an abysmal exclusion from society, and the same is true, logically, of all entities considered closest to nature. Historically, women, indigenous peoples, Black people and, in general, all races considered inferior have been examples of these entities.

All the main mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination that exist in modern societies, whether based on class, race or gender, are ultimately based on the radical dualisms of humanity/nature, mind/body, spirituality/materiality. The ways in which modern society treats inferiority are modelled on the ways in which it treats nature. If abysmal exclusion means domination through appropriation/violence, nature—including land, rivers, and forests, as well as people and ways of being and living whose humanity has been denied precisely because they are part of nature—has been the preferred target of this domination and, therefore, of appropriation and violence, since the 17th century.

Environmental destruction and ecological crisis are the flip side of the social and political crises we face, which conventional policies are increasingly unable to resolve. Different schools of thought have attempted to account for the double bind between ecological crisis and social crisis. Most point to the urgent need for a paradigm shift, which in itself indicates both the seriousness of the crisis we are going through and the magnitude of what is at stake. They agree that the paradigm shift consists of replacing the humanity/nature dualism with a holistic conception centred on a new understanding of nature and society and the relationships between them.

A paradigm is a specific type of social metabolism, a set of material and energy flows controlled by humans that occur between society and nature and which, together and in an integrated manner, sustain the self-reproduction and evolution of the biophysical structures of human society. From the 16th century onwards, following European colonial expansion and, in particular, the first industrial revolution in the Western world (1830s), the social metabolism characteristic of the capitalist and colonialist paradigm generated a growing imbalance in the flows between society and nature, leading to a metabolic rift. It is now accepted that this rupture, by creating a systemic imbalance between human activity and nature, marked the beginning of a new era in the life of planet Earth, the Anthropocene.

This imbalance has worsened to such an extent that we are now facing an imminent ecological catastrophe, a situation which, when it becomes irreversible, will seriously endanger human life on Earth. It is imperative to initiate, as soon as possible, a process of transition towards a different type of social metabolism, based on a different type of relationship between society and nature. This is what the necessary paradigm shift is all about.

The paradigm shift presupposes the need for a philosophy to underpin it and a strong social mobilisation to put it into practice. The transition is a historical process, which means that it is urgent to begin it, but it is impossible to predict its pace and duration. We have more reasons to be optimistic about philosophy than about social mobilisation.

Philosophy has been available for a long time; it is the set of philosophies of the peoples who have suffered most from capitalism and colonialism, the peoples who have often been exterminated, whose territories have been invaded, whose natural resources have been stolen, a historical process that began in the 16th century and continues in our time. I am referring to the philosophies of indigenous or native peoples. Fortunately, these philosophies have come down to us thanks to the resistance and struggles of these peoples against oppression, exploitation and annihilation. They constitute one of the hard cores of the epistemologies of the South.

Although these philosophies are very diverse, they converge on one point. What we call nature is conceived by these philosophies as Pachamama or Mother Earth. If nature is mother, source of life, and care, it deserves the same respect as our mothers who gave us life. In short, nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. This radical belonging contradicts any idea of dualism between human beings and nature. The divine entity, regardless of how it is conceived, is an entity of this world and can manifest itself in a river, a mountain, or a particular territory. The divine is the spiritual dimension of the material, and both belong to the same immanent world.

These philosophies will be present at the People's Summit, COP 525. They will be excluded from the main halls of COP 30, where those responsible for the problem will incessantly disguise themselves as promoters of the solution. And if indigenous peoples are occasionally allowed to speak, the official delegates and their physical or mental ties will take the opportunity to go to the bathroom, check their mobile phones and respond to urgent messages. From time to time, they will raise their heads to see if the indigenous people have finished. Then everything will return to the somnambulistic normality of the merry journey towards final disaster.

All this shows that we have the philosophies that would allow us to rescue human and non-human life, but we lack the social mobilisation to drive them forward and the paradigm shift they presuppose. In fact, the current period seems much more hostile to the idea of paradigm shift than previous periods. The greatest hostility stems from the threat of global war looming over the world and the growing polarisation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that fuels the politics of hatred.

A new world war will undoubtedly be more destructive than previous ones, and the destruction will affect not only human life, but also what remains of the ecosystems that sustain life in general. In turn, social polarisation and the tribalism that grows within it, fuelled by the promoters of hatred and identitarianism, make it impossible for humanity to dialogue with each other and with all the non-human beings with whom it shares planet Earth. The struggle for paradigm shift begins today with the struggle against war and against social polarisation fuelled by tribalism, identitarianism and the politics of hatred.

Original article here.