Gandarela, a serra e o movimento : ação coletiva e comunicativa na antecipação aos danos da mineração

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the collective action that resulted in the Movimento Pela Preservação da Serra do Gandarela (MPSG), and how this action unfolds in the legal, political-institutional and communicational fields in defense of water and against mining in the State of Minas Gerais, composing a social force capable of impairing the mining discourse. At present, the MPSG provides a perspective of future that opposes to the mining view, an innovative experience based on preventive actions to the damages caused by such activity, a preventive action of permanent vigilance on what threatens MPSG’s territory and values. The combination of knowledge gathered throughout the experience of living with mining and suffering its consequences connects MPSG’s actions to the urgency of the struggles in face of current environmental conditions of risk and vulnerability, especially when it is combined with two elements: water defense, and the opposition to mining. The methodological path offers itself as a key to understanding the emergency of this collectiveness and the mobilized actions that define its collective identity in the field of socioenvironmental conflict against mining, MPSG’s starting point. This paper also aims to understand the "self-saying" or how this collective subject narrates its struggle and builds its ability to act. MPSG’s action is based on horizontal organizational patterns, on the interconnection between different social actors, on a networking of specialized knowledge, on organic solidarity, and especially on the use of different communication strategies for different moments of struggle and deployment against implementation of the Apollo Project mining company Vale, in Serra do Gandarela. The research encompasses two moments from the fight in defense of Serra do Gandarela, which will lead to different movements: 1) The mobilization of the actors; 2) The campaign for the Serra do Gandarela’s National Park. Such moments unravel the saying no to an economic model based on extractive activities, as well as the ways in which the civil society make themselves heard when imposing limits to the mining activity. This research also highlights the importance of the pre-existing affiliation structure and the continuity of different social movements born in the conflicts against mining, the rising of a space where the group could share its experience, and a memory of the struggles. Therefore, constituting a school of environmental activism in Minas Gerais.