Conhecimento, natureza e sociedade no campo ambiental de Minas Gerais: um estudo com ambientalistas e técnicos de órgãos estatais de meio ambiente

Abstract

This dissertation consists of a study about the environmental field of Minas Gerais and the representations of nature incorporated in the practice of subjects that compose this field. The objectives were to analyze and understand how these subjects treat knowledge and produce and articulate environmental meanings and to identify where tensions in knowledge may potentially result in conflicts over natural resources. Mixed interviews (life histories and thematic interviews) undertaken by other researchers between 2002 and 2005 with environmentalists working, for example, in academia, public environmental agencies or environmental NGOs were analyzed. Another objective was to understand the organizational culture and the representations of nature that most evidently appear in the practice of professionals of agencies of the State System for the Environment of Minas Gerais (SISEMA/MG) and how this practice may be embedded in a broader context of conflicts over the natural world. For this objective, focused interviews were undertaken and analyzed in 2011 with environmental analysts of various areas that work in such agencies. Three possible environmental paradigms or perspectives that may be in a situation of dispute over a legitimate representation of nature in Minas Gerais were identified and discussed. The currently hegemonic and orthodox perspective of sustainable development based in the ecological modernization paradigm prescribes that economic development interests and those of nature protection be reconciled, through the practice of negotiations, dialogs and consensus building and the overvaluation of technical knowledge to the detriment of other forms of knowledge. The perspective, inscribed in the ecological modernization paradigm, that defends the protection of wildlife would also be contributing to depoliticize the environmental debate, identifying the environment with a strictly natural dimension and nature as an external entity and separate from a social dimension. The heterodox and anti-hegemonic perspective represented by the environmental justice movements forwards a critique of the sustainable development paradigm, recognizing the existence of diverse forms of knowledge and modes of meaning and interaction with the natural world and tensions and hierarchization and exclusion processes between subjects. It is also concluded that there has recently been a tendency to reinforce in the SISEMA/MG agencies a culture or perspective that identifies the environment with a strictly physical-biotic dimension, resulting in the invisibilization or negation of human and social dimensions associated with nature occupation processes. In environmental licensing procedures, such culture tends to distance environmental policy from debating about the socio-environmental viability of development projects and from considering alternative projects of society. Recent reforms in the structure of the SISEMA agencies, such as their decentralization process, also seem to have accentuated the incorporation in the practice of these agencies of a mitigation and compensation logic and of the ecological modernization assumptions, reinforcing the exclusion of alternative forms of social life through the imposition of capitalist economic development projects, seen as inevitable.