Voices of the Earth – COP30 Special
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Voices of the Earth – COP30 Special
Voices of the Earth
Manifesto and environmental chronicles for COP30
For a culture of living with the planet
Blog Multivias
Introduction to the “Voices of the Earth” Dossier
In 2025, Brazil hosts the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30. Held in the Amazon, this edition is both symbolic and practical: for the first time, the forest that sustains the planet’s balance becomes the center of the global climate debate.
But the conversation about the future does not begin at international summits. It begins in backyards, on streets, in the biomes that shape the country and sustain its identity. With this conviction, Blog Multivias has gathered, in this dossier, the manifesto and the chronicles that make up the project Voices of the Earth.
The voices collected here speak of urgency, and also of hope. They are born in the Cerrado, cradle of Brazil’s waters and biodiversity, and they expand to the Amazon, to the cities, and to the world. What they share is a simple and profound message: there is no sustainable future without memory, without balance, and without listening.
These texts combine literary narrative, environmental data, and everyday observation. They are portraits of a country that still resists, in its trees, its people, and its ideas. And at the same time, they warn us that the time for waiting has passed.
The Voices of the Earth Manifesto opens this dossier as a call to awareness and action. The four following chronicles, about the pequi tree, the macaúba palm, heat, and concrete, compose a mosaic of intertwined themes: urban expansion, the loss of biomes, the climate crisis, and the need for a new pact between humans and nature.
More than a literary document, this dossier is a contribution to COP30—a reminder that solutions to the climate crisis will not come only from agreements, but also from the stories we tell, the choices we make, and the roots we decide to preserve.
Because there is still time, if we act now.
Voices of the Earth Manifesto
In 2025, Brazil welcomes COP30 in the Amazon. The planet reaches this gathering amid record-breaking heat, extreme droughts, and deforestation. The time for promises is over. The time is now for concrete action.
Blog Multivias— which for years has portrayed, in its chronicles, the relationship between human beings and nature—launches the Voices of the Earth manifesto to draw attention to an essential point: environmental preservation begins in everyday life. In our choices, in our cities, in our backyards, and in the biomes that form Brazil.
The Cerrado, the country’s second-largest biome, is the cradle of waters and a refuge for unique species. Yet it is disappearing in the face of urban sprawl and deforestation. According to MapBiomas, between 1985 and 2023 the Cerrado lost more than 40 million hectares of native vegetation. Each native tree lost, a pequi, a macaúba, a quaresmeira, represents a rupture of balance that directly impacts the global climate.
The climate crisis manifests itself in droughts, floods, biodiversity loss, and ocean warming. Heat is already altering entire ecosystems while concrete advances over fertile soil. The way we build, produce, and consume must change. And change now.
Therefore, this manifesto presents five urgent commitments:
- Value and protect Brazil’s biomes, especially the Cerrado and the Amazon, as pillars of life and climate regulation.
- Place environmental education at the center of public and community policies.
- Promote the planting of native species and the restoration of degraded areas.
- Encourage sustainable urban practices—from city planning to the rational use of water and energy.
- Ensure that COP30 is a space of listening and visibility for local voices—communities, writers, artists, and defenders of nature.
The future will not be decided only at international conferences, but in the everyday actions of each person. Blog Multivias believes that telling stories about the land is also a way of preserving it.
May this manifesto echo among COP30 participants and inspire a new culture of living in harmony with the planet.
Because there is still time. There is still time, if we act now.
Blog Multivias
October / November 2025
Brasília – DF
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#NatureAndCulture
#BrazilForClimate
#ReflectionAndActio
Chronicle 1:
The Last Pequi Tree?
A chronicle about memory, the Cerrado, and resistance
The pequi tree, a symbol of resilience, reveals the human impact and the urgency of preservation.
In 1996, I discovered a corner of the Cerrado that insisted on being paradise. On the outskirts of Brasília, a new neighborhood was being built with wide streets and a promise of harmony: human infrastructure bowed to the logic of springs and native vegetation. The plots, still unfenced, breathed deeply. There were ipês of every color, wild cashew, barbatimão, lobeira, macaúba, quaresmeira, and pequi—so many pequis. The first residents were guardians of that world. They planted fruit trees but knew that the true wealth was already there.
Then the houses grew, the fences appeared, and the green memory began to fade. New residents arrived with different desires—not to preserve, but to impose. For many, the Cerrado is still seen as “bushland,” something to be cleared and replaced with magazine-perfect gardens filled with exotic plants that shelter no native bird.
Little by little, the pequi trees disappeared.
Years later, I walked through much of that neighborhood searching for survivors. I walked beneath a sun no longer filtered by familiar crowns. And then I saw it: a pequi tree trapped between a fence and a sidewalk. Could it be one of the last of what was once called paradise? Like an old fighter, it resisted.
That image haunts me. And I ask: do you remember what your street, your neighborhood, looked like ten or fifteen years ago? Do you remember the trees that vanished? What are we doing for those that remain?
These questions gain weight when we remember that, according to MapBiomas, the Cerrado has lost 6.4 million hectares of native vegetation in the last decade. Known as the Heart of the Waters, the Cerrado feeds 8 of Brazil’s 12 major river basins. Its vegetation acts as a living filter, allowing rainwater to penetrate the soil, recharge aquifers, and nourish springs that form rivers essential to the country.
When a pequi tree falls, it is not only a tree that disappears, it is a spring, a life cycle, a piece of Brazil’s identity.
It is urgent to reconnect cities to their original landscapes. Planting a native seedling is not just a symbolic gesture, it is a political act of resistance and care.
How can we build without destroying? How can we keep native trees in our streets and yards? More than answers, we need action, before the last pequi falls and, with it, our memory, our flavor, our Cerrado.
2025 Note: The Cerrado, a central theme of COP30, now accounts for 44% of Brazil’s deforestation-related emissions. May this biome, invisible to the hurried eye, be seen and defended as the climatic heart of the nation.
Chronicle 2:
Macaúba: A Palm Against Global Warming
A chronicle about resilience and the Cerrado’s bioeconomy
The macaúba palm, native to the Cerrado, embodies resilience, shade, nourishment, and a response to the climate crisis.
Its beauty is rough, full of thorns. Its names are as many as its uses: macaúba, bocaiúva, coco-de-espinho. Acrocomia aculeata is a silent guardian of the Cerrado, a native palm that doesn’t mind being called “cow’s gum” by children who chew its sticky pulp.
But its true greatness lies beneath the surface: its roots weave an underground network that holds the soil and prevents erosion. It is the perfect example of how nature operates, useful and beautiful, sustenance and structure at once.
The same logic that should protect it is the one that threatens it. In lots across the Midwest, the macaúba resists, until “progress” arrives with its bulldozers. In Brasília’s neighborhoods, administrators, in an act of aesthetic blindness, have even tried to replace it with the royal palm, “more noble,” they say, and of foreign origin. It is Brazil’s tragedy in miniature: exchanging what is native, adapted, and efficient for what is imagined to be superior.
Each macaúba uprooted is more than a botanical loss, it is a step toward imbalance. Studies by the Brazilian Institute for Environmental Research (IPAB) and Embrapa show that the Cerrado has already lost more than 50% of its original vegetation, and native palms like the macaúba play an essential role in carbon fixation and soil regeneration. Deforestation, of which it is a victim, is not a local problem. It is one of the engines of global warming.
The macaúba is also a promise for the future. Its oil can be used to produce sustainable biofuels, and the reuse of its fruits and shells generates income for extractivist communities. In the Amazon and Cerrado, bioeconomy projects are beginning to include Acrocomia aculeata as an ecological alternative to palm oil. But the main ingredient is still missing: recognition of its symbolic and climatic value.
The macaúba’s example teaches that the climate struggle takes place on the ground, in the choice of which tree to plant, in the resistance against illegal deforestation, in the valuing of what is ours, native, and resilient.
Preserving the macaúba is not only about saving a tree. It is about ensuring a more balanced future for the planet. The solution to global warming may begin in our neighborhoods, our backyards, in how we look at the soil beneath our feet.
2025 Note: At COP30, Acrocomia aculeata returns to the center of discussions on bioeconomy and a just energy transition. May Brazil learn to see its native species not merely as resources, but as responses—living, green, and rooted—to the climate crisis.
Chronicle 3:
When Heat Changes the Future
A chronicle about imbalance and the time that has already changed
Heat already decides the sex of species. Ice burns. The planet breathes in gasps.
There is a silence that comes before extinction, and it doesn’t come from where we expect. One example is the overheated beaches of Australia, where increasingly hot sand determines the future of a species. For the green sea turtle, sex is not genetic luck—it is a thermometer. When sand temperatures rise above 29°C, more females are born; above 31°C, almost all are female. Studies from NOAA and James Cook University reveal that in some regions of the Great Barrier Reef, 99% of hatchlings are female. It is global warming quietly reshaping the continuity of life.
And while heat sterilizes beaches, in the Arctic it releases ancient demons. Ice, that geological archive of the planet, melts and releases methane - a gas up to 84 times more potent than CO₂ in the short term. Images of blue flames burning over ice are real. They portray our paradox: the fire that gave us civilization now threatens the balance that sustains us.
Wildfires, droughts, floods, they are the visible symptoms. The planet’s fever affects everything: river flows, virus resistance, agricultural yields, and even the emotional and economic stability of populations. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global average temperature has already risen 1.3°C since pre-industrial times, and every tenth of a degree further amplifies the risk of extreme events and ecological collapse.
Climate change is no longer a warning, it is a record. We are living the story of a world struggling to breathe amid the heat. And the question that remains is not scientific, but moral: what will we do, we who read this chronicle on screens that consume energy, knowing we are part of this fire?
2025 Note: COP30, held in the Amazon, seeks to reinforce the global commitment to limit warming to 1.5°C. But science is clear: the limit is near, and time is short. May this conference turn promises into action, before the sand and the ice finish telling the story for us.
Chronicle 4:
The Earth’s Airship Balloon
A metaphor written in 2022, now even more urgent
Between concrete and heat, the planet asks for lightness. Goiânia is the starting point for this reflection on how we inhabit the world.
My Goiânia is gone. I hardly recognize it anymore. A wall of concrete hides it. I left forty years ago, carrying with me the memory of a city of houses, of soil, of roots. What I see now is a city that wanted to reach the sky but, in the process, lost itself.
Vertical growth is a global phenomenon, and in Goiânia it has transformed the horizon. Concrete replaced the Cerrado, heat multiplied, and sealed soil became a symbol of urbanization that ignores nature. Each building rises as a monument to haste and forgetfulness.
It is not just nostalgia—it is evidence. Research by the Federal University of Goiás (UFG) and INPE shows that the city’s average temperature has increased by 2.3°C in the last four decades, while the number of urban trees has decreased by about 40%. These “heat islands” amplify discomfort, increase energy use, and worsen air pollution. The city that was once planned and green has become an example of what happens when planning gives way to profit.
The belief that life improves the higher we live reveals an unsustainable logic. Air conditioning, meant to fix the heat we ourselves create, consumes energy and intensifies greenhouse gas emissions. The cycle is perverse: the more concrete, the more heat; the more heat, the more energy; the more energy, the more carbon.
Where are the breezes that cooled balconies? The sunlight that naturally lit homes? The rainwater once collected and returned to the ground? We replaced them with glass facades that reflect heat and expensive systems that try to imitate the balance we abandoned.
As I wrote in April 2022 on my blog Multivias, the Earth is like an airship balloon:
“We believe we can fill it with everything—junk, cement, machines, urgencies. We tamper with its structure, replace its original parts with ‘modern’ engineering, alter the gas that sustains its flight… until one day, the weight wins over the air.”
(Multivias, “Goiânia, beyond the aparta-ments,” April 2022)
Today that image returns with even greater force. The Earth continues to carry our buildings, our cars, our noise, and our rush. We pile up “progress” as if storing clutter in an old house, believing there will always be space, that nothing will collapse. But every balloon has its limit. Air has its limit. So does trust.
There comes a point when weight overcomes lightness, and the thin air can no longer sustain the flight. We are approaching that point. It is still time to lighten the load, to keep only what is essential, to look at what sustains instead of what merely elevates.
It is still time to realize that Earth doesn’t just need to rise—it needs to keep breathing.
And we, with it.
Even so, there are paths. Brazilian architects and engineers are developing projects that merge technology with bioclimatic design: buildings with cross-ventilation, green roofs, rainwater harvesting, living facades, and permeable pavements. The ancestral wisdom of Indigenous and quilombola peoples shows that it is possible to live with nature, not against it.
Goiânia, and so many other midsize Brazilian cities, can become laboratories for a new urban model: more human, lighter, greener. The challenge is to prevent the balloon from bursting before we learn to land gently.
2025 Note: At COP30, the theme of sustainable cities is among the central pillars. The way we build and occupy urban spaces will be decisive for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. May Goiânia and all Cerrado cities become examples of reconciliation between architecture and the planet.
A special feature by Blog Multivias in support of COP30, with a manifesto and chronicles on environment, culture, and everyday life.
An invitation to reflection and action.
#VoicesOfTheEarth #Multivias #COP30 #EnvironmentalWriting #ClimateAction #Sustainability #EcoLiterature #EnvironmentalAwareness
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