- In an interview with Mongabay, Brazilian agroecologist Tião Alves tells how he has been teaching thousands of rural workers to survive in the Caatinga biome, severely afflicted by drought, climate change and desertification.
- At the head of Serta, one of the most important agroecology schools in the Brazilian Northeast, he teaches low-cost technologies that ensure food security with a minimum of resources, both natural and financial.
- Currently, 13% of the Caatinga is already in the process of desertification, the result of a combination of deforestation, inadequate irrigation, extreme droughts and changes in the global climate.
While wind turbines and solar panels multiply across the Brazilian dry forests, Tião Alves insists on tin windmills and PET bottle-based heaters. “Backcountry technology,” as he defines it, arguing that the best solutions to make life possible in the Caatinga semiarid region are those born from popular wisdom. “Those that sprout like a seed you put in the ground.”
This, and the understanding that, to survive in a challenging biome like the Caatinga, you need to learn from plants and animals: Thousands of species that have found ways to adapt to the scarcity of rainfall, to the point of making this the most biodiverse semiarid region in the world. That is why he calls the Caatinga an “invisible university.”
Sebastião (nicknamed Tião) Alves dos Santos says he’s an “animal of the Caatinga” — born, raised and still living in the heart of the Brazilian dry forests. Now settled in the city of Arcoverde, Pernambuco state, he has been since 1989 one of the mentors of Serta — Alternative Technology Service, one of the most important agroecology teaching centers in the Brazilian Northeast region.
Tião himself says he has helped train more than 2,000 technicians at Serta. Rural workers coming from all over the Northeast to one of the two campuses — in Ibimirim and Glória do Goitá, both in Pernambuco — in search of advanced knowledge to ensure food security with minimal resources (both natural and financial).
Stoves lit by sunlight and cardboard boxes, for example. Water pumps powered by bicycle wheels. Clay pots transformed into refrigerators. Cooking gas produced from animal manure. And also Recaatingamento, bioconstruction, agroforestry, permaculture and anything else that helps to settle the Caatinga population in their birthplace without the need to consume native vegetation. And, in addition, to earn extra income. As Tião summarizes, “planting water, eating Caatinga and irrigating with the sun.”
In this interview for Mongabay, Tião talks about the concepts behind Serta’s methodology, his love for the Caatinga, and how to survive in a biome severely affected by climate change and desertification.
Mongabay: What’s so important about the Caatinga?
Tião Alves: The Caatinga biome corresponds to 11% of the Brazilian territory; that’s more than 900,000 square kilometers [350,000 square miles]. And this dimension gains an even greater significance when it comes to biodiversity. It’s one of the most biodiverse biomes in the world, but it remains invisible to many people. I say that the Caatinga is an invisible university because it has a lot to teach us. It’s time to take advantage of these teachings that the Caatinga offers us. But that we, human beings, stubbornly refuse to see. And we can’t continue in this invisibility in the face of the climate change global scenario.
What can the Caatinga teach us, for example?
Tião Alves: We need to relearn a new concept for the biome because we were taught that the Caatinga was a place of scarcity and poverty. But what is scarce here is the understanding of the biome. Nature, in its perfection, wouldn’t create anything scarce. It was the universe that determined that this land would have exactly this amount of water, and all living beings in this biome make that reading. Except humans, who haven’t truly managed to adapt to the climatic conditions of the Caatinga yet. Because the biome itself didn’t put up any barriers. The nature here every day responds: ‘I’m not poor. There’s plenty of richness here. You just need to use it properly, with respect, and I will continue to serve future generations.’
What richness is this?
Tião Alves: Look at our sun. Is there a greater wealth than the sun here in the backlands? This sun gives more color to our fruits, more scent, more flavor. It’s not a matter of water scarcity; it’s a lack of applied mathematics here. The day humanity understands that the amount of water in the Caatinga is sufficient to sustain life with dignity, he will learn to capture, store and use that water. Plants do that. They’re here, teaching us. An umbuzeiro tree [Spondias tuberosa] is a sponge in the Caatinga, capable of storing over a thousand liters [265 gallons] of water. The cacti here transformed their leaves into thorns and created a serum in the stem to not absorb so much heat from the sunlight. They close their stomata, which are the pores, during the day and then open these stomata at night. Look what a teaching. But irrigation isn’t even done at night here; people irrigate during the day, when the sun is strongest.
Why haven’t the Caatinga population found an effective way to coexist with this environment?
Tião Alves: In this region, we have the Catimbau National Park, and in excavations there, a skeleton of 6,600 years was found. What lesson do we take from that? If there were people living in this region all that time, it means the land is good. No one lives in a bad place. The second thing: Our ancestors here, during the colonization period, were decimated. We didn’t expand in the sense of understanding the biome in depth. Because our ancestors were murdered by the colonizers or expelled from their places. We forgot the tradition of using these potentialities. Something remained, present in Indigenous communities. But then came the school to teach that this culture was backward, that it didn’t serve white people. Now we’re paying the price.
How is climate change affecting the Caatinga?
Tião Alves: The biome is vulnerable, yes. Starting from September, October, it easily reaches 36°, 37o Celsius [97-99° Fahrenheit]. With global warming, you add another 2°, 3° to that. And that’s very significant because, with this sudden change, there’s no time for organisms to adapt. But I still think we have time. A very short time. We need society and the government to start taking care of the 2030 Agenda, to accelerate processes. From now on, what will happen is migration, people fleeing their regions in search of milder climates. The same thing that happened with cities. And anthropization increases the demand on these environments.
What needs to be done to reverse or delay this process?
Tião Alves: We need three basic elements. We need to plant water, eat Caatinga and irrigate with the sun. With these three elements, it’s possible to reverse the situation in the biome. How do we plant water? Simple, just take the seed, put it in a bag and then take it to the field. There’s no better way to plant water than reforestation. And I’m going to say here a term that I like to use: We need to recaatingar. Bring the Caatinga back. Not reforesting in the way that even some official bodies wanted to do before, bringing species from outside to plant here. We don’t need this; the Caatinga already has its own beauty.
The other thing is learning to eat Caatinga. The Caatinga is full of plants that could be on our table without us having to cultivate exotic plants that need a lot of water. They’re fruits and vegetables rich in nutrients, resistant to drought, adapted to semiarid conditions. And here we are, still wanting to plant lettuce. There are so many other plants here, even richer ones, which don’t require the same amount of water and that sprout naturally, but we don’t even know how to make a salad with them.
And what would irrigating with the sun be?
Tião Alves: Those who are fortunate enough to be born under 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, as is our case here, are born with resistance. Even being white colored, they are born with a suntanned skin to acquire resistance. So, our sun means wealth. Because, besides using it in the form of electricity, we can use the sun to heat water, dehydrate fruits, dry grains, treat the water we drink — especially in the poorest communities, using PET bottles. It’s a simple thing to do that eliminates 100% of pathogens.
Where does Serta (Alternative Technology Service) fit into this strategy of exploring the Caatinga potential?
Tião Alves: By educating people. As a professor of agroecology at Serta, I have already helped train 2,400 technicians. And these people are out here, doing agroecology within a not-so-academic concept. Because agroecology arises exactly from the experience of our ancestors. She is in the small farms, in the backyards, in the groves, in this pure, native, sincere agroecological reality. The one that sprouts like a seed that you put in the ground.
And there’s one fundamental thing, which is the friendship between human beings and plants. In pure agroecology, you don’t cut down a lemon tree because another one grew. The guy here says, ‘I’m going to keep it here because I’ve been talking to this lemon tree for 30 years.’ For 30 years, that lemon tree has been the chapel, the place where they talk to God. It’s under the lemon tree, the mango tree, the orange tree, that they welcome their friend, throw a party. This is not an academic inheritance. This is the inheritance of Black people, Indigenous people. This is a Black, Indigenous heritage. This is human heritage with pure humanistic meaning.
What do you teach at Serta?
Tião Alves: What I teach is passion. Passion for the Caatinga. Because my way of embracing the Caatinga is by teaching my students to love it. I still get goosebumps when I talk about these things because I think I’ve dedicated myself to this: planting hope. In the Caatinga, if we don’t have hope, we give up. The main discipline of the course is to teach people to look at their place with pride in having been born here.
For this, they need technology. Not sophisticated technology, but so-called low-tech. Aquaponics, for example, a food production system in which you use 10% of the water of conventional systems, and you put it right at the door of your little house, where the area is dead, where it’s desert. And the best part is that it’s the woman who’s going to take care of this. It produces food and the woman gains economic independence. Our technicians at school learn how to do this.
What is the most important knowledge that people acquire at Serta?
Tião Alves: When the student enters, the first lesson is to discover who they are. It’s the knowledge they need to recognize themselves as a legal citizen. From the second lesson onwards, they discover what they have. Usually, the student says, ‘I’m very poor, I have nothing.’ We give them a questionnaire, and when they come back, they say that ‘on my father’s property, there are 10 chickens, two goats, a pond, a well, three mango trees, two cashew trees …’ And they also make a list of what they know how to do: They know how to chop wood, make charcoal, dig a well, a pond, build a fence; they know how to plant, to harvest. But they think they don’t know anything. And that’s how they go to São Paulo. To do what? A bricklayer. At Serta, they learn to refine the knowledge they already have.
How important is it to work on this self-esteem in the young people who live in the biome?
Tião Alves: The important thing to do is to create desire. To build knowledge to be potent. Where? In the land that was weak. So that the student also makes that land potent. Because they will only be potent if their land is potent. Then other people will also take that energy, which multiplies, and then the community becomes a powerhouse. That’s why our Indigenous people are the ones who migrate the least. Because they clung to the land. And that’s why they preserve it. Because Indigenous people are animals from the forest, just as I am an animal of the Caatinga. I can’t separate myself from the Caatinga. I have the features of the Caatinga in me. The nutrients that come from the backlands soil circulate through my veins.
What does it mean to be an animal of the Caatinga?
Tião Alves: It means to be root, stem, leaf. It’s to have the cleverness of the margay [Leopardus wiedii], the resilience of the mandacaru cactus [Cereus jamacaru]. Learning to store water. Being an animal of the Caatinga is to be the Caatinga itself, which sometimes is laden with thorns, just like I feel laden — sometimes nobody wants to get close to me, afraid of getting pricked. But that’s just the external, because internally there’s this essence where sap circulates, where cells are in a vibratory frequency producing resistance, resilience.
Is this animal of the Caatinga also threatened with extinction?
There are several species of the Caatinga threatened, including this human animal. Because of climate change, the tendency is for this semiarid region to become arid. Of these 900,000 km2, 13% are already desert. Everywhere there are these patches of desertification. And the big risk is that these patches will meet.
How did the Caatinga reach this point of desertification?
That happened with the entry of cattle into the backlands, with the cultivation of cotton and the advent of irrigation technology, which was done haphazardly and salinized many areas. And deforestation: A lot of burning to make charcoal and supply the major cities. This, and the lack of correct policies to develop the Caatinga. There was this whole mechanism to sustain a dominant class to exploit the people of the backlands. The infamous “drought industry.” The climatic droughts, we know when they will happen here: There is one every three years, a larger one every seven, then one even larger every ten. It’s cyclical. Knowing this, previous governments could have devised actions to combat these droughts.
What is missing for Brazil to look at the Caatinga the way it deserves?
I think there’s a bit of national shame missing. Because since the Portuguese colonization, this place has suffered from political actions, to meet the needs of those in power. It doesn’t take much for Brazil to pay off this debt it has with the Caatinga. One public policy that minimized the suffering of people here was cisterns — more than 1 million were built. It’s much cheaper to build a cistern than to keep a community being supplied by water trucks. And it doesn’t create political dependency.
Another thing is the school, which could be contextualized: Studying the things related to the region and, from there, produce science and develop this place. But we need to take the reins of our own development. This is our revolution. We’re not going to pick up a weapon to shoot our brother, but we can make a different school. That’s why I’m a teacher. For me, the school is a cannon. Every class we teach is a blast.
Image banner: Tião Alves, an agroecologist and professor at Serta — Alternative Technology Service, in the Brazilian Caatinga. Image by Rafael Martins/Mongabay.
See related coverage of agroecology schools in Brazil:
‘Viable, just & necessary’: Agroecology is a movement in Brazil
Citation:
Niemeyer, J., & Vale, M. M. (2022). Obstacles and opportunities for implementing a policy-mix for ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change in Brazil’s caatinga. Land Use Policy, 122, 106385. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106385
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