Marina Silva, who twice already won 20 million votes in Brazil’s last two presidential elections, is one of the world’s most popular politicians standing for sustainability and real transformation. This year she is running again. She says of herself, she is neither on the left nor on the right but in front, wanting to integrate innovation and sustainability with successful economy and good governance.
Born into a family of poor rubber tappers in the Brazilian forest and illiterate until the age of sixteen, Marina learned how to read and write and became a very impactful activist and union leader, senator and government minister. During her time as Minister of the Environment, Marina engineered an 80% reduction in deforestation.
Making the Impossible Possible: Tackling Huge Challenges
Dreams give us strength to overcome obstacles, and transcend concrete limitations that are imposed upon us.
Walter Link:
Marina, you are a very interesting and rich example of the diversity of knowledge. You quote the bible, psychoanalysts, scientists and you also say that you have a PhD in life knowledge when you grew up in the richness of a living wisdom in the forest.
And you also have very pragmatic knowledge so that you could, for example, as a Minister of the Environment, put in motion the reduction of 80% of deforestation over ten years. So, there is a great integration of different types of knowledge: traditional and natural, pragmatic and intellectual and spiritual. How do you see this integration, how do you experience and live this integration?
Marina Silva:
Ideals, dreams, values, and some philosophical and spiritual theories or principles are the wings that make something concrete fly when it is very heavy and difficult to move. When we started to implement the plan aimed at fighting against the deforestation of the Amazon, there were 27,000 km2 of deforested land in 2004. And to reduce such high and dangerous numbers, by the threat that it poses to the forest and to the planet itself, in a time that economic growth was around 5% to 7%, it was not easy to do.
We were driven by a great number of ideas and people from many sectors of society. Therefore, we were able to avoid thinking about this as something impossible to overcome. I knew we could change something that was extremely difficult into a challenge that would drive not only me, but the entire team.
Ideals, dreams, values are the wings that make something concrete fly when it is very heavy and difficult to move.
We knew that this was the most urgent and important thing to be done. If we solved all the other issues and did not slow down the deforestation process, we might as well have done nothing. This became a problem to us. A problem that needed to be solved, because this would move and strengthen solutions to all other problems. Sometimes, when a certain thing is placed in a particular system, it can change the entire system. This idea is what drove us.
Dreams can be translated into pragmatic actions. Dreams, ideas, and theories give us strength to overcome obstacles, and transcend concrete limitations that are imposed upon us. Otherwise we would all still be just sailing and riding horses. People kept dreaming and making these dreams come to true.
What is most important is not to see life, politics, and science merely as repetitions, but rather as living processes. In a living process, each situation must be analyzed and understood. Then we must deal with it using a corresponding set of actions that fit that living reality which is completely unique in each moment of life, and of history.
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