CHARLES FREWEN
FROM BRAZIL
05.10.19
THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM
Some people talk about climate change as if it were a vastly complex subject, and so if there is a solution it must also be vastly complex or by implication impossible. Others talk about climate change as if it is a simple problem and must therefore have a simple solution. They are both right in different ways but the truth is it really doesn’t matter. What matters is not just the call to action but that we actually do something.
Whenever I was caught whinging as a child or a youth, my Grandmother always used to say to me: “Stop complaining about things, get on with life and try and make the world a better place.”
Nobody can deny that Planet Earth is warming and that the polar ice caps are melting at an unprecedented rate along with a host of other extreme consequences related to a warming planet. To the sceptics who think this is just a cycle and therefore “No need to worry” I say this : "If measures can be taken which make economic sense on any view AND reduce carbon in the atmosphere then why on earth wouldn’t you take them? It’s like getting a life insurance policy for free. No downside and plenty of upside."
SIMPLE AND COMPLEX AT THE SAME TIME
Climate and climate change are both simple and highly complex. The climate embodies the entire world in which we live and our own interactions with it. But, like a complex mathematical problem, if you can manage to break it down into lots of little simpler problems then it can be addressed, not next week, not tomorrow but right now. Yes, Today! There are already solutions to many of those smaller broken down parts and we should be dealing with the ones we can right now. We can already produce energy without carbon emissions. Solar is competitive and getting more so. Wind is competitive, micro-hydro likewise. And on the horizon there are potentially other solutions too; new technologies are being explored that could use decades of discarded radio-active nuclear waste, which would otherwise pollute the planet in perpetuity, and transform this into new clean energy.
Professors Chichilnisky and Eisenberger have been discussing carbon negative power plants for over a decade. They presented one of these at the Rio + 20 conference in 2012 where I happened to be a participant and exchanged a number of ideas with them during the conference. It is possible to capture carbon from smoke stacks, convert it into bio-char and put it back in the earth. This is a lot cheaper than the trillions that it would cost to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it beneath the oceans.
LET'S PLANT TREES
The planet needs to be carbon negative sooner rather than later. And while there are many existing technologies and new ideas for how to become carbon negative the simplest of all is the oldest one known to both man and nature: plant trees. As well as sucking carbon emissions out of the atmosphere, remember that half of our medicines originate from plants and trees. This is yet another bonus, along with preserving biodiversity and reversing habitat loss, that comes along with the "free insurance policy" of planting trees.
And planting trees in the Brazilian Amazon where our company is located also helps regulate rainfall patterns across the American continent; scientists estimate that evaporation from the Amazon rainforest produces 15 trillion litres of water a day, a phenomenon referred to as "Os Rios Voadores" or "The Flying Rivers". Without these flying rivers harvests could fail across the continent.
The stakes couldn't be higher and the timing couldn't be more urgent. What we need now is for the “Conscious Crowd” all over the world to act. Let’s not wait for the politicians to react. Politicians are always reacting, we need to act. Fruits of the Amazon is already executing a simple, practical, pragmatic solution. We hope in the future that lots of others come along and copy us, with other simple practical solutions in Brazil and in other parts of the world.
Having lived in the Amazon for more than three years and spent more than 30 years visiting and 50 years studying it, the reality is often a little different from common perception but what is not in doubt is that we need the Amazon and the Amazon needs us to both protect and restore it.
People ignored me at first, then they laughed at me 25 years ago when I told them I was going to catalogue all the plants on my remote Cerrado property, Fazenda Toucan Cipó. When I eventually wrote the paper, encouraged by Dr Marcelo Andrade, founder of Pro Natura, it led to studies together with scientists from all over the world headed by The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Over a six year period we ended up cataloguing 1,200 native species of plants within less than a twenty mile radius. That is roughly the number of native plant species there are in the entire United Kingdom. We also discovered 13 new species of plant, one of which the scientific community named after me: “pilosocereus frewenii”. I wonder who is laughing now?
This is a new and even more exciting adventure. So join us in our quest at Fruits of the Amazon.
YOU NEED THE AMAZON
AND THE AMAZON NEEDS YOU
AND THE AMAZON NEEDS YOU
