DEATH TO THE FASCIST BIOCENTRISM !

When the protection of the environment becomes a pretext to the arbitrariness

“Heil Goering!” The lab animals in Germany greet the Reichsfuhrer for his imposed legal restriction to vivisection. The Reichmarshall, in August 1933, announced the end of “the unbearable torture suffered in experiments with animals” and threatened to take to concentration camps “anyone who still think they can treat animals as lifeless property!”…

By Antonio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro

“The tyrant will always find a fair excuse to execute their tyranny”.

(George Fyler Townsend – 1887)

The Culture of Arrogance

It is worrisome, especially in Brazil, the way certain groups and authorities operate the environmental law and management.

There is a mental effort for acting, in this segment, that harms justice and distorts the law enforcement, weakens the legal certainty and the solidity of institutions of the Democratic Rule of Law.

Involved by the “biocentrism” or the “ecocentrism”, individuals invested with authority develop syllogisms to justify arbitrariness, based on arbitrary premises and ideological views that differ from the national development and the people’s needs.

This process of infiltration of the biocentrism in the Public Administration and Judiciary has been producing a sensation of official unsafety, without producing any real gain for an ecologically balanced environment.

As a rule, the biocentrist action begins in arrogant, radical and unilateral behaviors. The pretext is the intransigent defense of the “natural environment”, of  “native ethnical groups”, of the “preservation of cultural heritage”, and so on.

The biocentrists try to transform environmental goods into untouchable goods  and/or unavailable legal goods. They ignore the human nature of the conflicts  for the use of environment resources.

They also ignore the demands of social, cultural and economic order – human actions which transform the environment and are necessary to the innovation and development.

The biocentrist is a dictator that demands your own
“politically correct” approach for the others. 

School for little Dictators

The biocentrism withdraws the human kind of  the center of the  concerns about the ecologically balanced environment . By doing so, it dehumanizes the application of  law to the environment  protection.

This displacement of the human being from the core to the periphery of the law enforcement goals, transforms the applier of the law into a “guardian”, an enlightened who won’t care in giving weight to the natural protection in the resolution of environmental conflicts – won’t give attention to human needs  and even less to a humble entrepreneur (who made reparable mistakes). 

Under the biocentrism, the operator of the law,  the public manager, have the holistic power of privileging global natural resources in each decision of local trait. It morally authorizes them to discard rights, goods and people, including the national interest – all in the name of the “rebellion of the objects against the human actions”.

This idea of a “rebellion of the objects against the harmful anthropic activity” prioritizes the elements that surround human activity, rewarding them as the subject of law (even though  would  not formally so considered). This “elevation” of interests interferes, neuro and linguistically, on the biocentrist operator behavior  - praises, elevates and makes  proud. The result is the conformation of the biocentrist indoctrinator  into  a kind of dictator of politically correct conducts, against any one.

As a school of little dictators, the biocentrism involves the naïve individual into a cocoon of intellectual vanities and emotional needs  reciprocally stimulated .

The biocentrists confuse public interest with mere psychological impulse of meddling in the others’ moral behavior, to orientate economic and social activity.

Biocentrists point the  intimidating  "green fingers"  to anyone who are not under their airtight standard of values.

The vanity over all  

There’s no moral, constitutional or ethical base which authorizes the biocentrist school to dehumanize the right – although it can formulate doctrines, judicial decisions and legal rules in a large scale, causing harm of every order to citizenship.

The ecologically balanced environment, as a good of common use by the people, as says the Constitution, is not limited to the natural environment. It also include  the right  to quality of life of the population and its several and diffuse needs of social and economic development. This human interrelation is the  good that should receive legal protection.

The UN does not differ of this understanding, since it added to the Principle 1 of its Declaration of the Environment and Development, in 1992, that “the human being is the center of Sustainable Development issues”, reinforcing the humanist character in the international effort in favor of the sustainability.

The biocentrism segments, however, distort the humanist scope of the environmental law. They dehumanize the legal framework of environmental protection, and do this certain of their purity of  purposes.

They consider themselves honest, doubtless because of the elevation of their interests.

Pure in their convictions, biocentrists don’t hesitate to destroy
rights and constitutional guarantees, on behalf of their dehumanized
 vision of the environment to be protected by them…

The routine of dehumanization

The biocentric authoritarianism is synergic: it imposes to citizens the unilateral understanding of what would be the environmental good  legally protected and reproduces this understanding in a geometric scale, through administrative rules, laws hastily discussed or judicially contradictory decisions.

Follower of the statolatry, the biocentrist acts without respecting the scientific or doctrinaire understandings. He ignores situations that deserve more accurate historical analyses or even circumstances already consolidated.

The biocentrist interprets, acts, accuses, investigates, sues and judges as if the factual reality should  not matter, just the good will to do. He judges under the aegis of the “politically correct”.

In their daily routine, the biocentrist protects biomes without considering the use of properties, consolidated human activities, existing familiar economies. He does it, sometimes even causing conflicts and considerable injustices.

Not rarely, as authority,  biocentrists control the  territory ignoring hundreds of thousands of individuals who live there. There was case of determine the removal of people who living in protected areas, or risk areas, even under the law, without consider  the  settlements and the potential conflicts that could occur from the displacement  executed without a solution for the demands of housing and quality of life to the evicted people.

The motto is explicit:" love nature, ignore people". 

" love nature, ignore people"

Principles and Manichaeism

Under the platonic tradition, biocentrists have the monopoly of virtue. Therefore they are morally authorized to dictate to others how they should “be born, live and die”.

They do it, logically, ever in benefit of others - even though others might not want it…

The punishment for those who disobey the biocentric precepts is the hell of environmental degradation.

The biocentric dilemma is manichaeist and inquisitor: “control or chaos”; “the full rescue of the good wild and of the nature or the apocalypse”.

On the horizon, you have the appalling sight of a burning world, affected by global warming – like a paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel  (artistic geniuses who denounced the sufferings and exposed the Holy Inquisition to ridicule).

Genials tutors of the pan-principiologism, these enlightened beings reach the absurdity of creating legal principles of nowhere or deform the understanding of those which exist,  according to their needs of moment.

Delighted with their own protagonism, they alter the republican regime redefining the rule of law.

Instead to do an exegetic enforcement, biocentrists usually use the logic of the principals to decide... even to justify the refuse to obey the rules.

The jurist disappear, the “Ayatollah” arises.

The hermeneutics is crushed by a "principiologic approach". The exegesis follows the light of a dehumanizing understanding.

There is no more hierarchy. The "green mullahs” remake the  legal minding, judicial  and administrative procedures. They dont care about  the tripartition of powers,  about the rule of  process and the perfected judicial acts in the time and the judged causes.

In the judiciary, the effects are evident.

Lost in kilometer-long quotes, the biocentric judicial decision reveals a rhetorical (and manipulative) mental effort. Decisions contaminated by biocentrism ignore jurisdictions and conflicts which should be solved.

Involved by the biocentrism, magistrates forget the wise lesson from judge Stephen Breyer, from the US Supreme Court: “We are not here to create a doctrine, but to solve cases.”

Racialism, eugenism and hate against modern civilization. Even though biocentrists use excuses of defending ethnical minorities, fight  against GM crops and preserve the nature, they have criteria which doesn’t differ from that one used by Nazis to separate “the good” from “the bad”.

A Nazi phenomenon

This posture, denounced here, is not something new. It has a Nazi-fascist origin.

In fact, the set of laws of defense the natural landscape heritage and the animal tutelage, elaborated in the Nazi Germany, the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Law of Protection of Nature), used the same line of thought.

In fact, the  jus-environmentalists of the German Reich equalized domestic animals with wild ones, considering forests into national protected heritage. They implemented “ethnographic operations”... of racial segregation "in favor of peoples of Germanic culture and blood".

The effort of the Nazi biocentrism was based on three pillars: racialism, the polycracy and the conservationism.

The Nazis defended the purity of the environment, the public health care and respect to the animals. They implemented laws for the raising spaces, insolation and confortable transport to birds, swines, equines and bovines.

Obviously their environmental concerns were not extended  to rational beings, considering the treatment dedicated by  the "ecologists of the Reich" to the transport, accommodation and final destination of Jews, gypsies, dissidents and other individuals of cultural or racial habits  considered “impure”.

The Nazi polycracy inserted a way of social control over the polluting activities, uses and customs. This social control took the German Nazis to develop and enforce, in a pioneering way, laws forbidding the consumption of cigarettes in public spaces and transportation ways - The “politically correct” in favor of  the “public health care” for the Aryan race.

Hitler, in addition to being an anti-smoker, was a vegetarian and had his dog as this only real friend… Ironies aside (lets a moment of humor to soften the tragedy), it’s important to notice that the current biocentrism, even adopting the "statecracy" as form of solving all problems, and the fight against  the market economy as preferential speech, didn't adopted, from the Nazis, its ecological nationalism.

The biocentrism nowadays tends to be internationalist. It creates hindrances to structuring actions in the national States.

In the case of Brazil, even though many of its followers have not awareness of this, the biocentrism often resorts to foreign NGOs to internationalizing sovereign interests. The biocentrism, today, make the national sovereignty a relative concept.

This ideological orientation, paradoxically , reaffirms the fascist face of biocentrism. It reinforces the invasive potential of the public power on behalf of the guarantee of a “healthy” environment.  This invasive process starts dictating rules of conduct stricter by the day towards the use of property, technical and scientific orientations of analyses in the enterprise authorizations. It restrains personal conducts,even the free circulation of goods and services.

Hieronymus Bosch – a detail of his damnation to hell. A prediction of the biocentrist environmental degradation.

The dictatorship of the pen

The biocentrists are adepts of the ideocracy. To they, the citizens  are considered beings rationally unable to choosing the best to themselves. It’s like admitting that the State could reduce the people to a set incapable political beings who need a parent who knows and can predict everything.

For other side,the biocentric contamination of the operators of law and public managers who don’t detain popular mandate but have permanent power, like prosecutors, judges and public lawyers, represents a risk to the republican democracy.

Stablished in their positions, they are not subjected to the direct control of the population. This contamination affects the core of the bureaucracy of the government.

In the  administrative structure, there are no efficient system for correction, to impose hierarchy and discipline effective enough to stop the harms that biocentrists authorities could cause.

Disagreeing employees start being persecuted as dishonest and entrepreneurs are "burned alive" in the bonfire of judicial activism...

With that, essential activities are sinking in the sea of the bureaucratic slowness.

The infrastructure projects suffer with the morosity of environmental licensing.

In Brazil, factors such as these have already redirected the national energetic planning, in which the loss in profitability of the hydric potential is flagrant and is shown in the decennial plan in course.

The Brazilian energy matrix, until then based on the development of clean and renewable energy sources, specially the hydric, is going back to the use of fossil energy – mainly from thermal plants which work with coal and oil.

This throwback can be charged to the bill of enormous hindrances of licensing and restrictive norms to the use of the soil, issued by a bureaucracy pursued by biocentrists committed to disarticulate any initiative to making use of the hydro-energetic potential in the north region of the country.

The amount of environmental restrictions required by biocentrists does not allow to have space to produce

The fallacious “Prohibition of Retrocession” ( Non Regression Principle )

The most serious example of dissonance in implementing environmental legislation is the biocentrist insistence on reinstating the old Brazilian Forest Code, disfigured and patched, denying validity to the new legal mark duly approved by parliament and sanctioned by the executive.

The abrogated Forest Code was full of doctrinal biocentric concepts, imposed without scientific base and introduced through the Provisional Measure edited by the president FHC in 2001.

The presidential initiative begot discord and authorized arbitrariness - all without any improvement in the protection of our heritage florestal. The need for a new Forest Code that would respect the reality, with new rules consistent with the country's current stage of development, was obvious.

To resolve the conflict, the National Congress, bearing, discussed and approved through regular and democratic legislative process, the new legal framework that meets the diversity of dimensions and technical definitions for the defense of the forest reserves and areas of Brazilian preservation, defining mechanisms that reconcile environmental protection and development.

Unsatisfied, the biocentrists reacted.

Thus, they weaved the so called “Principle of the Prohibition of (socio)Environmental Retrocession” - or Principle of Non-Regression.

This “Principle of Prohibition” is a mere exercise of reactionary proselytism.

As lords of the time and of the things, the biocentrists articulated a way of granting academic shine to a doctrine mechanism which could allow them to disrespect the legislative process, the autonomy of powers of the Republic, including the popular mandate - all reflected on the new Forest Code, the federal law 12.651/2012.

The preservationists of the regression, are attempting now to implement the obtuse, teratologic principle of prohibition against an inexistent environmental retrocession. They are trying  to deny validity to the law  produced under the rules of the Federal Constitution of Brazil.

The biocentrics are  pushing out of the reasonable  limits traditional legal concepts, included in several legal marks, that ban revert labor and social rights.

But, they ignore the dynamic character of the balance of the ecosystems - which involves all the biological, social and climatic elements, including the human beings – something that escapes the domain of law. 

In fact, the law is only effective if it recognizes the reality of the facts. The law can not simulate the facts. However, the  “prohibition to retrocession” exactly aims crystallize the environment through legal syllogisms.

Science, biology and physics, are what determine the ecologic balance. Balance is a dynamic process. Therefore, it’s impossible to understand what “balance” means, what is a "equilibrium" in a dynamic relation.

So it's not hard to imagine the absurdity in the biocentric intention of apply the doctrine brakes of “prohibition of retrocession to something that we don’t know if "goes back,goes on, goes out, recoils or expands - like the dynamic process of the environmental balance…

This way, the “prohibition of retrocession” is fallacious, an enormous rhetorical foolishness that embarrasses the justice, stains the jurisprudence and should be scratched off the modern law doctrine.

Himmler, Chief of the SS, picking flowers on the meadow…

The decoy of the false dilemmas

The Brazilian environmental legislation must be applied in the humanist and democratic patterns in a fair and impartial way.

The biocentrism, however, removes the democratic character from the environmental management. The biocentrist  wants to “defend” the environment, dehumanizing the norm.

The biocentrism says that dehumanization is necessary to the benefit of man, as to not privilege an ancient anthropocentric egocentrism, responsible for the destruction of the existent natural resources. There’s no humanism in biocentrism.

Resume the human being  its position in the center of worries with Sustainable Development, however, is the first order of the first principle of Declaration of Principles of the UN Conference about Environment and Development from 1992.

Time to react before it’s too late

Therefore, it’s time to expose and denounce the biocentrism.

This effort must count on the agreement of free citizens, economic agents, organized civil society and every political leadership committed to the pluralist democracy.

State chief, State Ministries, National Congress, Judiciary power, leaderships, academic areas and scientific institutions must pay attention to this plague that contaminates segments of Public Power.

It’s imperative that government s and Civil Society organize efforts to safely conduct the environmental politics in favor of sustainability, development and democracy.

Separating the biocentrist darnel from the good wheat that feeds mankind, we  retrieve the environmentalism from the claws of ecofascism to reaffirm the commitment with the true Sustainable Development.


Ending


In the movie "The Night of the Generals," the character of Omar Shariff - Major Grau, when asked as to why was obsessed with investigating a common murder, committed by a general, in a world war - when murder is the occupation of the generals, said "then let us say what is admirable on the large scale is monstrous on the small. Since we must give medals to mass murderers, why not give justice to the small… entrepreneur."

Then, this article is focused on damages caused by small bureaucrats, who imbued his "sacred mission to save the environment", work and decide without any humanity. That is the form how the biocentrism cause damage to economies, projects and investments.

Biocentric agents harm ordinary citizens and force public officials to adopting their point of view, and they do it in democratic regimes.

Therefore, it is not a school of great dictators, that harm millions, but  a dangerous doctrine of little fascists who daily undermine and weaken the structures of democratic regimes.

After all, democracy is produced on a daily basis,  including ordinary relations between citizens and state.

There’s no sustainability outside the democratic rule of law!

Antonio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro is a lawyer (USP - University of São Paulo ), managing partner of Pinheiro Pedro Advogados (law firm),  journalist and environmental consultant. He’s a member of Green Economy Task Force of International Chamber of Commerce, member of the Environmental Law Commission from the Institute of Brazilian Lawyers (IAB), member of the National Commission of Environmental Law from the Federal Council of  the Brazilian Bar Association – OAB, chief-editor from the Portal Ambiente Legal, editor of the DAZIBAO electronic magazine and responsable to The Eagle View blog. 

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