Alter geoengineering (The Thousand Names of Gaia Conference; English version)

www.osmilnomesdegaia.eco.br | rio de janeiro, 09.2014

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Alter geoengineering

Renzo Taddei

“There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of metaphysical

expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it has in mathematics.”

Wittgenstein, 1984, 1e

Introduction1

This presentation has two main goals. The first is to contrast the way most

environmentalists and scholars from the humanities in the so-‐called West understand and

evaluate geoengineering with how certain traditional, or non-‐Western collectivities

understand the question of the “manipulation” of the atmosphere. After a brief

presentation of the concept, and current efforts in geoengineering, two cases will be

presented and discussed: one related to the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon, via the

thoughts of one of their most important shamans, Davi Kopenawa, and the other related to

the Afro-‐Brazilian tradition of Umbanda, specifically the activities of the Coral Snake Chief

Foundation.

The second goal, more implicit and transversal, consists in putting up for

debate one of the outcomes of the reconfiguration of the notions of body and agency that

came about with the “ontological turn” in philosophy and the social sciences. I evoke here

one anecdote by Levi-‐Strauss, where he affirms having found in Brazil, among indigenous

groups, individuals who claimed, to be capable of seeing a star during the day, something

he could not do. A few years later, Levi-‐Strauss found in the historical records, reference to 1 Paper presented at the Thousand Names of Gaia – from the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth international colloquium. Rio de Janeiro, September 16, 2014.

renzo taddei | alter geoengineering

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medieval sailors who also affirmed being able to see the same star, during the day. Levi-‐

Strauss concluded that there are organic and cognitive capacities that were lost, by

modern Europeans, with the advent of modernity – contradicting the general perception

that they are the pinnacle of the organic and mental development of humanity. Death itself

is part of the equation: it is recurrently said that one of the problems of modernity is that,

in transforming each of us into an economic resource, capitalism erased our capacity for

(properly) dying. Not knowing how to die is, paradoxically, at the root of the many

genocides of which we are the cause: it is curious that the societies founded in what

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro called a metaphysics of predation kill less than those that

believe themselves founded in the ethics of (Christian) love. The ethnographic cases that I

will discuss in this text refer to peoples who have other capacities, which include the

ability to combine bodies and deaths (or, in this case, dead people) in ways that the

majority of us don’t believe ourselves capable.

The context and backdrop of this discussion is the fact that the attempt at

overcoming certain modern dichotomies (subject/object, organism/environment,

culture/nature, etc.) implies a transformation in the ways we understand organisms, life,

the locus of agency and sentience, the atmosphere, and death. I will return to this at the

end of the text.

Geoengineering

In the words of Clive Hamilton, geoengineering refers to the “deliberate, large-‐

scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset

some of its effects” (2013, p. 15). Generally speaking, such schemes are variations or

combinations of the following: manipulation of the cloud cover of the planet, the changing

of the chemical composition of the oceans, or the covering of the planet with a layer of

particles that reflect part of the solar radiation back into space. Regarding the oceans, the

dominant schemes advocate their fertilization with iron, resulting in a mega-‐expansion of

algae that would sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Both the cloud manipulation

solution and the spraying of sulfur particles into the stratosphere aim to reduce the

amount of solar rays that reach the surface of the planet, replicating the effect of large


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volcanic eruptions of the past (2013, p. 58). There are other, still more fanciful solutions,

such as the installation of mirrors in space, which aims at reducing the amount of heat that

reaches the Earth.

Geoengineering is the theme of heated international debates. Techno-‐

billionaires, such as Bill Gates, believe that geoengineering is not just the only effective

solution to climate change – given the lack of capacity of international diplomacy to

address the problem -‐, but also a potentially profitable industry (Kintisch, 2010; Hamilton,

2013). Conservatives in the United States, particularly those directly linked to the military-‐

industrial complex from the time of the Cold War, see geoengineering as an opportunity to

bring new life to sectors of the network of research think tanks in military technology, by

using geoengineering as a potential weapon. This is despite international regulations in

place since 1977, banning “meteorological” warfare (Hamilton, 2013). Liberal scientists

like Paul Crutzen, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry who, together with

ecologist Eugene Stoermer, popularized the term Anthropocene (referring to the present

as a geological epoch in which the effects of human action have reached the scale of

geological processes), understand that geoengineering is far from being a desirable

solution, when compared with the alternative of reducing carbon emissions. They

nevertheless say that the moment will come when making use of some type of

geoengineering solution will probably become inevitable (Broad, 2006).

Environmentalists, philosophers, and social scientists, on the other hand, refer

to the topic with a mix of indignation and horror. The improvement in knowledge of

climate systems during the last decades, has made evident a greater degree of uncertainty

and variability than previously imagined, rather than increasing the power of human

action over nature. Complex systems theory, on the one hand, and the concept of trophic

cascade, originated in ecology (Pace at all, 1999), on the other, show that changes in any

ecosystem generate multiple and interconnected reactions, many of which we cannot (and

may never be able to) predict (e.g. Scheffer et al, 2005). It is no surprise that there is no

previous instance of atmospheric engineering which is considered fully successful, at least

when considered in relation to its original goals.


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In addition to this, global environmental change makes the historical

databases on the atmosphere less reliable in our attempts to forecast the future, especially

for forecasting techniques based on statistical methods: we may not know what the future

will be like, but it seems clear that we should not expect the future to replicate the past. Of

the two approaches to forecasting the future of the atmosphere (and of many other

dimensions of ecosystems), one relies on our understanding of the past (the so-‐called

stochastic methods), and the other on the physical and chemical systems in question (in

meteorology these are often referred to as physical methods), systems that are

mathematically modeled and simulated by computers (Edwards, 2010; Taddei, 2013). Yet,

as mentioned, the more scientists know about natural systems, the more they understand

that our grasp of them is only a little more than minimal. In summary, there is no way we

can put geoengineering schemes in practice knowing, with an acceptable level of certainty

or precision, what is being done and what it can lead to.

There is a growing body of critical literature on geoengineering in the

humanities (Fleming, 2009, 2010; Galarraga e Szerszynski, 2012; Hamilton, 2013;

Macnaghten e Szerszynski, 2013; Szerszynski et al, 2013; Szerszynski, 2014). Many

authors are incapable of discussing geoengineering without becoming exasperated

(besides Hamilton 2013, see 2014 for a good example). In Hamilton’s account, in

particular, Western societies are locked inside a complex web of factors that combines the

fetishization of economic growth (2013, p. 173), individualistic and materialistic

hedonism, and psychological mechanisms of cynicism and self-‐deception (“wishful

thinking”; 2013, p. 141), in such a way that, despite the growing scientific consensus on

what is going on in the atmosphere, the main capitalist societies, and the United States in

particular, seem to have decided to walk towards the precipice, hoping that a technofix

will save everyone at the last minute.

Such exasperation reflects a sense of a lack of alternatives, and one of the

many possible reasons for that may come from the fact that the discursive genre (or

language game [Wittgenstein, 1953; Fischer, 2014], or metapragmatics [Fairclough, 2006;

Silverstein, 1998, Taddei & Gamboggi, 2009]) through which popularization of science and

scientific journalism takes place – defining, as a result, how environmental debates take


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place in Western public spheres -‐ is structured around the same bourgeoise capitalistic,

ontological and epistemological presuppositions, that generated the climate crisis in the

first place. In the U.S. (and in Australia [Latour, 2014], Norway [Norgaard, 2011] and many

other places), logical arguments and clear facts seem to hold little political sway. Donna

Haraway recently mentioned that the oil companies and the military have great interest in

the disappearance of the ice in the arctic, where around a third of Earth’s natural gas

deposits are located (2014; also Hamilton, 2013, p. 25). Hamilton points to the apparent

irrationality of oil companies that deny the anthropogenic dimension of climate change,

but at the same time fund geoengineering research (2013, p. 108); he also affirms that the

American military complex banks on climatic crises, so geoengineering schemes can be

put into effect without needing to pass through democratic debate, as typically occurs in

emergency situations (2013, p. 171). Yet, none of these – arguments, evidence, facts,

logical reasoning -‐ seem to be politically effective. Therefore the exasperation: what, then

has political efficacy?

One productive way of approaching geoengineering is to think about the

cosmopolitics of desires associated with it, and its constitutive powers. This is a question

that, in a way, transcends Foucault’s concepts of biopower (1998) and governmentality

(2009)2: it is not possible to think about the existential crisis humanity faces by focusing

on factors that are strictly, naturalistically “human” or “social”, in the Durkheimian sense.

The political economy of the factors in question effectively includes the elements

themselves, so to speak. As has often been repeated, capitalism may not care about the

atmosphere, but, it is much more critical that the atmosphere isn’t preoccupied with

capitalism.

More specifically, the ways in which capitalism depends on the idea of

externality and on open systems (from which undesired costs can be exported) is coupled

with certain forms of subjectivity, with their specific emotional grammars and patterns of

2 Although it does not reduce their importance; it may very well increase it, if we expand both biopower and governmentality to post-‐human realms. Povinelli’s concept of geontologies aptly does that (Povinelli, 2014).


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perception. I don’t have time, space, or expertise to satisfactorily develop the historical

connections between European science, capitalism, secularization and the ideologies of

modernity here (for that see, Arendt, 1958; Hacking, 1990; Sennet, 1992; Stengers, 2000).

It is enough to mention that, after at least three centuries of “disconnection” between

scientific-‐cum-‐capitalistic ontological schemas and the materiality of local contexts (I am

using “disconnection” here not in a physical sense, but in a way that links Marx’s alienation

[Marx & Engels, 1968] and Latour’s purification [1993]), we now live in a situation that

could be characterized by the idea of the “banality of environmental evil” (Arendt, 2006;

Haraway, 2014). The environmental crisis makes evident that there is something wicked

about our perceptive and emotional patterns, and that they are intrinsically linked to our

material and institutional configurations. Deep environmentalism, where fences and laws

separate “humans” from “nature”, is no more than a manifestation of this. For many

progressive Westerners, the horror with which they contemplate geoengineering springs

from the idea that “nature should be left alone”.

It is at this point that I think traditional forms of thinking about and living

with the environment present themselves as interesting analytical tools to say the least

(Danowski e Viveiros de Castro, 2014). The point of interest of such forms of life is that

they tend to understand their worlds as enclosed systems3. This fact manifests itself in

many distinct forms, the common denominator being the relational approach to the

environment, that is, the idea that the interaction with the environment is understood as

connecting subjects, and is therefore regulated by moral codes. What is even more

interesting here is the fact that, exactly because nature is thought of, at one and the same

moment, as both the agent and outcome of transactions and actions of subjects (humans

and non-‐humans), it is naturally understood as something “constructed”. The idea of

constructing the atmosphere does not cause consternation for most traditional peoples, as

long as it is done properly. It is the animistic ontological base, in contraposition to

Western naturalism (Descola, 2013, 2014; Sahlins, 2014), which provides some degree of

balance between the construction and the plenitude of becoming of the involved beings.

3 It is probably unnecessary to point out that open and closed systems are used here as heuristic concepts.


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In the remaining sections of this text, I will discuss two cases in which the

construction of the atmosphere has taken place in Brazil: one particular case of

Amerindian thought, in Davi Kopenawa Yanomaki and Bruce Albert’s recent book (2013);

and a research project that I started recently, on the activities of the Coral Snake Chief

Foundation, an institution associated with the Afro-‐Brazilian Umbanda religious tradition,

whose members claim to be able to control the atmosphere via religious rituals.

The Yanomami and the building of Amazonian skies

I have stated elsewhere (Taddei, 2012) that

“the oldest and most deeply rooted meteorological theory in human history is

that ‘it didn’t rain (or rained too much) because of the actions (or sins) of

someone (us, or the enemy, inside or outside).’” (2012, p. 256).

This formulation is a variation of what Mary Douglas called the “forensic

theory of danger” (Douglas, 1992). It can be found in the sacred texts of the Christian,

Muslim, and Jewish traditions, for instance. For most animistic collectivities, a more

appropriate (and complementary) variation of this would be: “‘there was beneficial

rainfall because of the actions (rituals) of someone (a shaman, or priest)”. What I want to

discuss here is the idea, present in many cultural traditions, that the environment is not

guided by some form of impersonal mechanism, as in the Newtonian universe4, nor by a

detached deity, but by the group itself or by a special individual in the group. Sahlins, for

example, recently mentioned Marcel Granet’s description of Chinese cosmopolitical rituals

in the Zhou dynasty when discussing Descola’s ontological schema:

“For the year to turn along with the symbolic cross, it was necessary and

sufficient that the king, by his clothes, his food, and so on, dazzlingly manifest his

being in confor-‐ mity with the system of the universe. Winter was brought about

when dressed in black, with black stones at his belt, using black horses, a dark 4 Although, as mentioned by Viveiros de Castro [apud Sahlins, 2014, p. 282] there is a trace of animism in using the idea of law in referring to it, as something that etymologically and philosophically has the nature of a contract.


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carriage, a black standard, the king took up position at the NW corner of the Ming

T’ang and ate millet and pork. Did he eat mutton and wheat? Did he wear green

with green stones? Was his flag green? Did he give pride of place to sour taste,

rank smell, the spleen of victims, the number 8, the note chio? Did he put himself

in the NE corner of the Ming T’ang? Spring was coming. ... The sovereign action

which ... radiated from the capital to the nine provinces of the Chinese

Confederation, was performed by the king as a colleague of Heaven, in whose

name he promulgated the Calendar” (Granet, 1975, apud Sahlins, 2014, p. 288).

The case I want to discuss here is related to the Yanomami people who inhabit

(what we call) the frontier between Brazil and Venezuela. One of the their shamans, Davi

Kopenawa, recently published with French anthropologist Bruce Albert a book that is the

most detailed account of the Yanomami cosmology (Kopenawa & Albert, 2013). The book

is an extremely rich illustration of the different dimensions of the Yanomami universe.

Here I want to call attention to just two things: the first is the idea that the “skies” are held

in place by the constant maintenance carried out by shamans and their associate spiritual

beings; and the second is that some of these spiritual beings incorporate, in their actions

but also in their constitution, elements of the universe of the “white” people -‐ including

how they maintain the skies in place.

According to Kopenawa, Omama is the creator of everything, and the xapiri

are spirits associated with what we call the “natural world” -‐ animals, plants, geographical

accidents, astronomical bodies or events, seasons, states of the atmosphere, and so forth.

According to the book and other works on Amerindian perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro,

2002), given that these entities have a human essence, and although they are associated,

for instance, with an animal, they will not necessarily have the appearance of that animal.

The process through which someone becomes a shaman consists in an

arduous bodily, emotional, psychochemical, and spiritual training. Regarding the spiritual

dimension, to become a shaman one needs to construct a network of relations with the

xapiri spirits so as to be able to work with them in specific situations. I mention two

passages of the book in which this is exemplified in situations directly connected with the

“maintenance” of the sky. In the first one, we read:


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“But one day, a long time from now … [the sky] will come apart and crush us all.

But this will not happen so long as the shamans are alive to hold it up. It will

lurch and roar but will not break (…) As soon as the sky starts to shake and

threatens to crack, [the shamans] instantly send their xapiri to reinforce it.

Without that, it would have already collapsed long ago!” (p. 130-‐131)

In the second passage, the meaning of “maintenance” is a bit different:

“When the rain falls without interruption for days on end and the sky remains

full of dark low clouds, we start to tire of it. (…) Eventually we turn to our

shaman elders for help, for they know the rain being Maari well and can ask him

to stop. So they drink the yãkoana and start working. Their spirits wash the sky’s

chest and call the sun being Mothokari and the being of the dry season Omoari.

Then they turn the key that holds back the rain and bring light back to the sky.”

(p. 133)

And, finally, another passage introduces an interesting element to the

composition of beings and strategies that deal with the atmosphere:

Some xapiri such as the sloth spirit possess a rifle acquired from the spirits of the

white people’s ancestors. He uses it to intimidate the thunders into becoming

quiet and to fire at the evil beings and their hunting dogs. (p. 73)

Here I will break academic protocol and not offer an analysis of the material

just presented. Due to the text’s rhetorical strategy being grounded in the contrast

between different cases, I will proceed to the next ethnographic example – requesting the

reader’s patience.

The Coral Snake Chief Foundation and building of Rio’s skies

The Coral Snake Chief Foundation (FCCC is its acronym in Portuguese) is an

institution associated with the Afro-‐Brazilian religious tradition of the Umbanda5, which

5 Adelaide Scritori, the medium through which the spirit of the Chief interacts with the material world, is a white woman, probably in her 50s, who does not present herself as a member of an Afro-‐Brazilian terreiro (as the ritual centers are called in Brazil). Yet she has a son who runs a famous terreiro in São Paulo. There are


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operates in the business of producing or preventing rains, in Brazil and elsewhere,

through the spiritual actions of the spirit of the Coral Snake Chief6. In the last 20 years, the

FCCC has provided services to highly visible clients, such as the governments of the cities

of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and the entertainment company Artplan, producer of the

Rock in Rio festival since 1985, perhaps the most notable of all. Among other services, the

Foundation makes sure there is no rain over Copacabana beach on New Year’s Eve, when

one of the most remarkable fireworks spectacles in the world takes place. They have been

working with the municipal government of Rio de Janeiro since 2001.

Afro-‐Brazilian religious groups tend to be very discrete in their activities,

especially when outside places considered centers of Afro-‐Brazilian culture, like Salvador

in the state of Bahia, or the city of Rio de Janeiro. Even in these places however, they are

subject to growing levels of hostility from Neo-‐Pentecostal Protestant churches, adding to

centuries of discrimination from white elites. In such a context, one of the most

remarkable facts about the group of individuals gathered at the FCCC is that they seek

constant media exposure. Paulo Coelho, the best-‐selling Brazilian writer, was vice-‐

president of the foundation between 2004 and 2006. Adelaide Scritori, the woman who

channels the spirit of the Coral Snake Chief, and her husband, Osmar Santos, who acts in

the role of public relations for the FCCC, make themselves present at the most important

public events in Brazil and overseas. According to Maria Paola de Salvo, journalist of Veja -‐

the weekly news magazine with the highest circulation in Brazil and second highest in the

Portuguese language in the world -‐, pope Benedict XVI arrived in São Paulo, in May 2009,

on what the meteorological forecast predicted would be a rainy afternoon. It indeed

rained, but stopped the moment the pope left the airplane. According to Salvo, Ronaldo

Camargo, adjunct secretary of the municipal government of the city of São Paulo, had

numerous religious traditions in Brazil where spirits communicate through mediums (Umbanda and Candomblé, both associated with African populations in the colonial past; Kardecist Spiritism, imported from France in the 19th century and popular among urban white middle classes; and Pagelança, a generic name for the presence of Amerindian shamanism, with its innumerous traditions and variations, mainly in the urban centers of Northern Brazil), so reference to communication with spirits is not in itself a clear religious identity claim. 6 Who, besides the North American Indian chief from whom he takes his public identity, claims to have previously incarnated Galileo Galilei and Abraham Lincoln.


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called the foundation for logistical help in weather making. From January to September,

2009, the São Paulo city government requested the services of the foundation six times

(Salvo, 2009).

Marcelo Tas, an award-‐winning journalist in Brazil, did a telephone interview

with Osmar Santos the day after the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games, in

2012. Santos told Tas that

During the … opening ceremony, Adelaide was in Dublin, Ireland, where she

diverted the pressure waves coming from the North of the British Islands to

Spain, with the intention of alleviating the drought occurring in that country.

Meanwhile, from inside the stadium, Osmar sent her real time information about

the weather in London (Tas, 2012; my translation).

The journalist ends his text with the phrase “I don’t believe in witches, but

they indeed exist” (originally in Spanish” “No creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay”).

During a video interview with the History Channel, Cesar Maia, the former mayor of Rio

during whose term of office the contract with the FCCC was signed, and who is currently a

candidate for the Brazilian senate, used exactly the same phrase. The journalist, who did

not question this apparent irrationality, instead confronted Maia regarding his

presentation of himself as Catholic, to which the former mayor replied that he is

“Brazilian, carioca7, and botafoguense8, and therefore superstitious”.

The FCCC is also a long time associate of Roberto Medina and his company,

Artplan, through which Medina organizes, since 1985, the Rock in Rio musical festival.

Rock in Rio is now an international event with festivals in Rio, Lisbon, Madrid and Las

Vegas. Medina talks openly about his connections with the FCCC (Cruz, 2008). In July

2008, on the occasion of a Rock in Rio Madrid festival, Adelaide affirmed that “[they had]

diverted rains to the region of Catalonia, which was going through a drought then” (ibid.).

7 Inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro. 8 Fan of the Botafogo soccer team.


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According to the foundation, it does not charge for services provided to

governmental entities, yet it demands that the recipient of the service reciprocate in kind,

usually through some form of environmental program. In January 2013, for instance, the

FCCC announced the canceling of its association with the municipal government of Rio de

Janeiro, given that the latter had not delivered a report of activities carried out in 2012, in

response to past activities of the foundation. The announcement was made during heavy,

flood rains in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the municipal government quickly provided

the requested report and renewed the agreement with the foundation (Meinicke, 2013).

When the service is provided to private companies, like Artplan, they are charged.

The activities of the FCCC in Brazil are surrounded by controversy. Journalists

who publish articles about the work of the foundation, as Marcelo Tas did, are often

subject to hostile online comments from readers. In 2009, after en electric blackout that

left 18 states without power in Brazil, Arthur Virgílio, the leader of the opposition party

(PSDB) in the Chamber of Deputies in the National Congress, in Brasilia, formally invited

the FCCC to come to the house to explain what had happened (Bresciani, 2009). Virgílio

justified the invitation saying that “[Those in the government] say it was a lighting bolt, a

storm. No one knows. So, if no one knows, let’s call the Coral Snake Chief Foundation to

give a divinatory opinion, given that science and public administration cannot answer our

questions” (ibid.) Despite the clear intention of the act as a provocation to the ruling party,

the invitation was officially made, generating irritation in the government. The invitation

was formally canceled a week later (Jerônimo, 2009).

All that is, in a way, just a prologue to what is perhaps the most interesting

dimension of the activities of the foundation: its relations with science. In 1987, the

Brazilian Meteorological Society (SBMet) denounced the FCCC to the Regional Council of

Engineering and Architecture (CREA) of the state of São Paulo, alleging the illegal exercise

of meteorological activity. CREA is the equivalent for engineering and related activities in

Brazil to what the American Bar Association is for the exercise of the legal profession in

the US. No engineer, agronomist or meteorologist can work as such without the proper

permit issued by CREA. The institution is acknowledged as conservative in technical

matters; in the last decades, innovative, non-‐traditional engineering courses recently


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created in Brazil (such as environmental engineering, for instance), have been facing great

difficulties in getting CREA accreditation. In such circumstances, it was truly remarkable

that CREA’s verdict was in favor of the FCCC. Engineer Anthero da Costa Santiago,

responsible for evaluating and judging the process, in his report refers to the spiritual

entities and their activities as facts of reality, even if outside the scope of science, and

therefore of meteorology. He then suggested that the case be shelved, as subsequently

occurred.

The FCCC, nevertheless, charges for their services to private clients. In 1991,

CREA demanded that the FCCC request a permit for the exercise of meteorology. It also

demanded that the FCCC have a meteorologist in charge for the services provided. At that

moment, the foundation formalized the relation they had had with a professor from the

Department of Meteorology of the University of São Paulo, from whom it had been getting

technical consultancy for the work of weather manipulation. This professor, here

designated by the fictitious name of Ronaldo, began acting as the foundation's technical

director. More recently, a younger, but similarly high profile meteorologist, from the

Center for Weather and Climate Forecasting of the Brazilian National Institute for Space

Research (CPTEC-‐INPE), started providing similar consultancy services to the foundation.

Ronaldo, one of my main informants in this research, described how his first

contact with Osmar and Adelaide took place in the mid 1980s, when he was a part-‐time

professor and also produced weather forecasts for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo.

One morning the telephone at the newsroom rang; it was Osmar, introducing himself as a

members of the FCCC and asking for very unusual information: what needed to be done to

stop a cold front coming from the South from advancing over the state of Rio Grande do

Sul in the following days. The local meteorological service did not attend to his request for

information, and he therefore decided to call the newspaper weatherman. Ronaldo

answered that meteorology does not work by acting on weather phenomena, but only

describes them. Osmar insisted on the question: “if you could change the conditions of the

atmosphere in order to do that, what would you change?” Ronaldo consulted the weather

monitoring apparatus, did a few calculations, and informed Osmar that, if the atmospheric


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pressure over the state increased and reached a certain level, it would probably weaken

the cold front. In the following day, the atmospheric pressure increased and the cold front

dissolved. “I was astonished by this; there was no rational explanation for what had

happened”, Ronaldo, who was an accomplished meteorologist, and had studied in the U.S.

and participated in over a dozen scientific expeditions to the Antarctic continent, told me.

From that moment Osmar called Ronaldo often, asking for meteorological advice for

changing weather conditions. “We undertake spiritual operations that interfere with the

weather, and we need information from a professional of the area”, Osmar told him.

Ronaldo affirms he has witnessed incredible atmospheric transformations

associated to the activities of the Foundation; he nevertheless says that he is not

completely convinced in regard to how they explain what they do. During an interview, he

described one “spiritual operation”:

Ronaldo: I have seen that… they hold the cold front at the entrance to Rio de

Janeiro (…). It’s just like in Rock in Rio, it was incredible – an enormous cold front

reaching the area, and they held it. They asked me: what should I do to block this

cold front? Then I said: firstly, you need to strengthen the Northeast winds, to

hold the front; then you also have to change the western high trough , slowing

down its movement...

RT: Does the Chief understand this jargon?

Ronaldo: Yes. Adelaide often does not, and she asks for further explanations. All I

know is that you looked at the radar image and could see a small island of dry

weather.

When asked whether meteorological equipment can detect and document the

effects of the actions of the foundation, he said that it depends on the scale being analyzed.

At larger scales, the effects are not “spectacular”, in his words; sometimes they are very

subtle. Total precipitation over large areas doesn’t change, for instance. The same applies

for average temperature over long periods. It seems that the FCCC operates at a “blind

corner” of meteorology. Yet, as mentioned above, in the weather scale, the actions seem to

be detectable in equipment such as meteorological radars. In any case, the concept of

natural atmospheric variability has been evoked by his peers, throughout the last decades,


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to delegitimize any attempt in the scientific documentation of the activities of the

foundation9.

Tentative concluding remarks

It is likely that what I have just presented has provoked strong reactions in the

auditorium. Many of you must be avidly waiting for me to dissolve the indigestible force of

the presented material with a post-‐colonial theoretical solvent, or with a hermeneutic one,

or performatic, or a biopolitical one, whatever the case may be. All these dimensions

certainly exist here, but I am not convinced of the convenience of reducing everything to a

minimal common theoretical denominator at this moment. I will leave that for future texts.

As mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, the goal here is to contrast, even if

very roughly, different attitudes towards intentional transformations of the atmosphere,

and to reflect on the contrast itself.

The first and perhaps most obvious point here is that the discussion seems to

highlight how it is not lack of knowledge or certainty that makes geoengineering risky, but

the absence of a moral debate(s) regarding the relations between living organisms on this

planet. Contrary to the traditional approaches, the cosmopolitics of the desires of the

universe of Western technical knowledge and action is hypostasized around desensitizing

institutional apparatuses and desensitized subjectivities. In the Yanomami’s view, and

also, albeit differently, in the Umbanda tradition, the actions of the “white man” (in

Kopenawa’s terms) are detrimental to the environment because they are a-‐social in a

context in which everything is inside patterns of sociability. So the question all this raises

is: how to re-‐socialize the de-‐enchanted world of naturalistic materialism? I see advances

on many fronts in recent years: legislative reforms that give juridical rights to the

environment (Ecuador and Bolivia) and to non-‐human animals (cetaceans recognized as

non-‐human persons in India, the coordinated international wave of habeas corpus 9 Alongside other, less “technical” forms of delegitimizing, such as when they say that they are too busy working, underpaid, in understaffed institutions and agencies, pressed by overly inflated standards of academic publishing, and have no time for such “nonsense”.


16

requests for chimpanzees, including in Brazil and Argentina), the intensification of debates

around the production and consumption of meat, the popularization of social theories that

approach sociotechnical apparatuses via new analytical frameworks, such as Actor-‐

Network Theory or the cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway, among many others. It seems

to me that the weapons for revolution (even if perhaps not a cathartic, apotheotic one, as

mentioned by Haraway [2014b]) are already available, or at least are in advanced

development.

The second point, more complex and perhaps scarier, is the following: when

physics becomes metaphysics (i.e., when there is a decentering of materialistic

uninaturalism), how does one think paraphysics? In a way, the ontological turn “turned”

the theoretical reflection toward us, to places like Brazil, where not only have “we never

been modern” but, in certain ways, we never abandoned animism. It also turned the

reflection to places like Latin America where, more than science fiction, magic realism is a

key element in the collective imaginary. Is it possible to work with ideas such as “another

world is possible”, multinaturalism, and ontological anarchy, and still remain associated

with the gross Newtonian conception of the world that grounds modern anthropological

thinking?

What I am affirming here is that the “physical” conceptions (i.e., about

material reality) of most anthropologists are as poor as the anthropological conceptions of

most engineers. That explain why it is so easy to reduce any bizarre manifestations of the

material world to relations of power and/or psychological illusions. The principle of

symmetry suggests, in my understanding, that a symmetrical equivalent of the social

studies of science and technology would be serious physical research into other realities.

It is in these circumstances that the Coral Snake Chief Foundation case is

interesting. What we see there could be called a breach in ontic etiquette: there is no

negation of the Western, naturalistic ontology – as is the case in the evolutionism versus

creationism debate in the U.S., or when cataclysmic weather is interpreted as divine

punishment, instances in which there is no possible point of contact between science and

religion. Here what we have is a not-‐so-‐subtle public declaration that the Western

ontology is just a subset of the Chiefs’ ontology – who swallows the science and turns it


17

into something else (physically, media wise, politically). Even if the interviewed

meteorologists are reticent about it, reference is made, in their very narratives, regarding

the possibility of verifying the reality of the meteo-‐spiritual actions of the foundation via

scientific equipment. Rather than ontological war, what we have here is something that

resembles a metaphysical phagocytosis. The question then becomes: how to take this into

consideration in the anthropological reflection?

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Alter geoengineering (The Thousand Names of Gaia Conference; English version)

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