Brazil: a country at an environmental pivot

I am standing on the top of one of downtown Sao Paulo’s tallest buildings.

In a panoramic sweep of the city a forest of tower blocks intersperse with the low level splash of orange roofed shanty towns (favelas) stretches in every direction.

It’s late evening and gradually the outline of the towers seeps away to leave their outlines in the lit windows of the homes of 19 million people who live here.

Greater Sao Paulo extends to 34 million people – already by far the largest city in Latin America, now challenging to be the largest city in the world.

We are in Brazil, looking north to the Copenhagen summit to try to understand how, what some have described as the most important meeting of nations since the end of the second world war, looks from one of the “tigers” of the developing world.

Listen!
Listen to Jon Snow in Brazil on Audioboo.

I’ve never been here before and it’s fascinating to be in a dense and vibrant society in the south in which English, Britain, the empire, have no resonance whatever.

Outside influences certainly include the United States economically and in terms of corporate investment and ownership, but it happens on Brazilian terms – Portuguese is the first language of negotiation.

My bad Spanish, dwindling memories of Italian go some way to help, but language is a severe barrier if you speak no Portuguese – there’s a lot of guesswork and hand signals involved if your translator isn’t to hand.

It’s hard in your first 48 hours to get a handle on a place that so dwarves what we once thought as large – London or New York – yes it extends over the kind of area Los Angeles is settled upon but is far, far more densely settled.

The gulf, no, ravine between rich and poor is deep and compressed.

You can be walking along an urban high way, past shops that would be interchangeable with an up market branch of Boots, or Waterstones, and suddenly your guide indicates a tiny slither of a passage between two buildings.

You walk down it; a rough covered track barely two meters high, hardly wide enough for your shoulders, and 20 meters later you gasp as you meet the semi fresh air again.

You are in the midst of a heaving swarm of shanty life. Children playing in mud puddles, old men leaning on grubby brick walls smoking. Women hanging washing on wire lines across the street. And the noise of voices, music, revved up engines. Whole families live in tiny rooms stacked crazily one upon another.

Beyond this particular favela I look up at a modern tower block perhaps 500 meters away beyond the main street I had left a few minutes earlier. Ivy cascades from the elegant balconies, there’s a swimming pool on each of the 23 floors.

I’m off to observe the rush hour. Off to try to comprehend what this dash for development, growth, urbanization, and consumption is doing to a country richer than any in available agricultural land, attempting to create still more out of the residual scrub and forest – a country at an environmental pivot.

I also have to talk to a carbon trader about offsetting our own carbon footprint.

Jon says Boo
Krishnan Guru-Murthy hands over the Channel 4 News Audioboo mantle to Jon Snow.