More on Lula and the Amazon

Randy has another good post up on how terrible Lula is on environmental issues. He is going to a standby of the irresponsible--scoffing at first world nations for telling him what to do.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hit out at foreign critics of his stewardship of the environment on Monday, saying the world needed to understand that the Amazon belonged to Brazilians.

He told a forum in Rio de Janeiro it was "amusing" that countries who were among the world's worst polluters wanted to talk about preserving the rain forest.

"The world needs to understand that the Amazon has an owner, and that is the Brazilian people," Lula said.

"They are rubber tappers, fishermen and us who are Brazilian."

It's not that Lula doesn't have a point here in the sense that we have screwed the world up. But that doesn't mean the rest of the world now has free right to screw it up more. Plus as Randy says:

Do I need to remind him that the martyred Chico Mendes and the former Environment Minister he just pushed out, Marina Silva were rubber tappers?

Indeed. For those out there not familiar with Brazilian or environmental history, Chico Mendes was a labor and environmental activist in the Amazon killed by a large landowner in 1988. People have fought over Mendes' legacy ever since, with environmentalists claiming he was primarily an environmental activist and the left saying he died for labor rights. The answer of course is that he was both. Mendes pushed a working-class environmentalism that neither traditional labor or environmental organizations are comfortable with or even fully understand. But Lula is co-opting Mendes' legacy to push his particular brand of government.

I think the biggest problem with Lula is that he is an old-style activist of the developing world who believes that high modernist and developmentalist ideas are the way to make his country a power. He reminds me of Castro in this way, though to Castro's credit at least he has restored a lot of forest. While I think Lula is good in many respects, his environmental policies have a dinosaur aspect to him. That's sad. Moreover, it is dangerous to the Earth's future.