What does Brazil do about ecological trauma?
Brazil does not process its ecological trauma: it repeats the wound and transforms it into silence
by Chris Zelglia
Brazil is a nation that frequently faces disasters.
Bursting dams, disappearing rivers, burning forests.
But how do we deal with all this shared suffering?
We transform it into a discussion for a few days, into news, into social media posts, and soon after, everything keeps quiet.
We float between the tragedy show and programmed forgetting.
Our environmental trauma is not merely an ecological issue: it is political, historical, and psychological.
Ecological trauma in Brazil does not heal because the country insists on ignoring its existence.
In psychoanalysis, trauma is not just the event that occurred, but the difficulty in interpreting what happened. In Brazil, ecological trauma is incessantly repeated: each disaster revives a wound that has never been processed. Mariana, Brumadinho, Petrópolis, the Pantanal—each calamity is an update of a collective grief that lacks a public space for reflection.
Brazilian politics reacts to trauma with bureaucratic processes and hopeful initiatives. The promise of “reconstruction” replaces the recognition of pain. Instead of processing, we erase. Instead of caring, we outsource. Ecological trauma is, therefore, a reflection of our political culture: we avoid facing real suffering and prefer institutional anesthesia.
The silence does not represent an absence of words; it is a signal. What is observed in Brazil is the muffling of affected communities, of traditional peoples, of those who experience the collapse in their bodies and on the land. Ecological trauma becomes a policy of oblivion: the country that calls itself green is the same one that does not listen to the outcry of polluted waters and destroyed lands.
Working through ecological trauma demands the creation of policies that prioritize listening.
It is necessary to transform pain into a collective language, not an advertising campaign.
We need spaces for mourning, care, and a symbolic reconstruction, not just a material one.
Healing the nation’s trauma requires, above all, recognizing the emotional value of the land and the lives that depend on it.
Without this understanding, we will remain trapped in a cycle: always wounded, always in denial.
