IDEA and ABRA Collaborate: Green Marabá is on the International Agenda

ABRA’s Rivers of Meeting, the eco-cultural and socio-educational project rooted in Cabelo Seco community, entered its tenth year in January with two weeks of preliminary talks with potential partners in Germany to get 40,000 solar solidarity plaques donated by European eco-pedagogical networks and in the world. Young artists of the project are advocating and preparing for the Alternative World Water Forum and their second decade in the project. 

Back from Europe last week, the project's eco-pedagogical coordinator, Dan Baron Cohen, praised the commitment of the networks and projects he met to Good Living Amazônia. "Despite unprecedented storms that paralyzed the trains, I spent five days in the green city of Frankfurt, Bonn (which invented the solar panel) to present Marabá as a potential reference in Education for Sustainability, and Berlin, where I met the Head of the Theatre Pedagogy at University of the Arts, and where I gave a talk at the end of a march of 35,000 environmentalists for 'good living'. 

I listened to bankers, politicians, teachers, artists, organizers and entrepreneurs, and I learned that in order to reach and protect 40,000 solar panels, we will need to use a collaborative strategy, especially between schools in cities, so that the project is rooted in the training of children and young people who will educate their families and inspire their residents associations and community spaces. Marabá needs to understand that besides economizing, solar energy powers quality of life. "

Dan Baron Cohen explains: "Thousands of plaques donated by multinationals might enable us reach our goal more quickly. But to generate awareness to protect plaques and inspire community search for climate and social justice, which ensures well being for all, we will connect teachers, students and families here with their peer teachers and students out there, in return for popular knowledge. Each school in Marabá becomes a living laboratory for integral sustainability. The entire curriculum goes through the present world need to understand and care for sustainable life.Echo -practical in practice! 

Videos by the young artists of Cabelo Seco about their solar bike-radio project and afro-contemporaneia dance about the Amazon at risk inspired the Climate Alliance to offer to consult its network of 1700 municipal members in 26 countries in Europe on possible collaborations with Marabá. They motivated the Sustainable Environmental Education Network to invite schools from the Old Marabá to participate in a solar games festival in June. UNESCO-Germany might recognize Marabá as an exemplary green city if the City Council has the courage and vision to embrace susceptibility and rethink the mega-projects planned for the region. 

"The Temer government surprised the world on January 2," said Dan Baron, "with the unexpected decision to cancel all hydroelectric plants planned for the Amazon, for ecological, social and financial reasons. But the threatened privatization of the energy matrix and rivers in Brazil is worrying the world. A green, solarized Marabá will make each one of us a guardian of the future!"