Rubens Harry Born is an environmental activist in Brazil and has been part of the Greengrants network of Advisors for over a decade. His organization, Vitae Civilis, got off the ground with the help of a Greengrants grant in 1993; since then, it has become a key organization for promoting a cohesive and effective social-environmental movement in Brazil. Rubens recently won a national citizenship award in Brazil for his activism around environmental issues. We hope you enjoy getting to know Rubens a little bit more!
Also check out Rubens’ recent article on climate change.
How did you first become involved in environment and development issues in Brazil?
As a child, my family background influenced me to become aware of the need to care for our environment and society. I was taught the concept of social responsibility, especially important in the Jewish religion, from a young age. In 1968, when I was only 13, I was elected president of my school’s student union, at a time when students around the country were very active in political issues. Later, after I finished a degree in civil engineering, I started an organization with friends that focused on sanitation issues in urban areas around Sao Paulo. We were very much involved in urban environmental justice issues; we wanted people in poor areas to know they had a right to sanitation infrastructure. It was very hard to find a place to meet—this was during the dictatorship and we were not welcome. This group eventually split into various branches that focused on a range of issues, including an anti-whaling group—later to become the largest in the country. I was most involved in the urban environmental work, which led me to pursue a Master’s Degree in water management, in the public health department. Later I received a PhD in political science, in order to focus more on the social and political levels of change.
What is your organization’s strategy for creating positive social change?
There are three main elements at Vitae Civilis. The first is sensitizing people from all sectors of society to realize that if we don’t want to be victims of social injustices, we need to act consciously and together. To do this we create public awareness through a variety of techniques. Second, beyond creating consciousness, we must act. All parts of society have a role to play; we need to build dialogue across these sectors and create links among organizations. Third, we focus on concrete actions, both on the ground as well as at the public policy level. On the ground, we have an integrated approach. We focus on ways to both protect the environment as well as provide a better quality of life and income. We don’t like to say,”Don’t do this, not like that.” Rather, we try to show ways to empower local communities to find successful ways to pursue sustainable development. We then bring these experiences to other communities to encourage them to do the same. At the public policy level, we see the need for institutional change. There are thousands, if not millions, of local experiences that are important for creating change. But, we need to promote change at the institutional level as well so as to not lose momentum for national or even global policies.
Can you tell us about an instance within Brazil’s environmental movement that you saw as particularly successful or effective?
We have worked for many years to implement Agenda 21, which came out of the 1992 Rio United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. This is an ambitious plan to achieve sustainable development that crosses multiple fields and involves participation from all sectors of society. We realized that here in Brazil, the host country for the conference, we were not doing anything to work towards this goal one year post-conference. The president had just been impeached; it was a time of political turmoil. We decided that we needed to create dialogue on this issue and involve people from all sectors of society. In 1994, we had a meeting where we brought together the business sector, the government, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We repeated this annually, and in 1997 President Cardoso created a National Commission for Sustainable Development Policy and Agenda 21. In the meantime, we worked with a community to meet the objectives of Agenda 21, and after several years of meetings and a grant from Greengrants, the community transitioned from pesticide-dependent banana cultivation to organic banana cultivation, and added ecotourism and palm plantations to diversify their economic base in a sustainable way. Finally, in 2006, we were invited to partner with the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment to form a Brazilian Agenda 21 network, now with over 250 member organizations. This has been a long process, but we have kept a flow of information going and used an integrated approach to demonstrate that Agenda 21 can indeed be a reachable goal. (To learn more about Agenda 21, click here.)
What do you see as the biggest challenges for environmental protection and sustainable development in Brazil today?
In spite of the change the environmental movement has created—the government is now beginning to take us seriously—the environment is still not a key consideration at the national level when political and economic decisions are made. Right now, the national government only talks about the importance of economic development. Last week our president launched a new plan to accelerate economic growth through large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams and roads. The term ‘sustainable development’ is used to justify these practices, but it is used in a false way. In order to reach a balance, we need to create more dialogue among the government and big business sectors and us, to make sure they are aware of what is at stake if we don’t follow the path of sustainable development.