Socialização da natureza e alternativas de desenvolvimento na Amazônia Brasileira

Abstract

This thesis discusses alternatives for development in the Amazon, assuming that these can be created through the densification of relations between urban base and regional biodiversity resources. We argue that the impasses of development in the Amazon, for which it is necessary to discuss alternatives, derive from an undue binary opposition between human presence and nature and the identification between development and industrialization. We first discuss how this identification is structured on the vision of development derived from the European experience that both rooted and masks the centrality of the colonial process for the constitution of industry as the core of development and as privileged mediation between society and nature. We have come down this path to discuss the consequences of this vision for the corrosion of nature as a productive force and its reduction to the simple repository of raw materials. The implications of this reduction are then analyzed in relation to 1) the imprisonment of peripheral economies in processes of underdevelopment and dependence on externally induced economic dynamism; 2) the invisibility and degradation of the spheres of reproduction and everyday life as fundamental moments of an development pattern that is not limited to the expansion of industrial production. Next, as a strategy to discuss alternatives to development mediated solely by industry, we seek to reconstitute the place of the City and the Urban in social and economic life, understanding what it has historically been and what the role and significance of forms of urban mediation Between nature and society. Based on the works of Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacobs and Karl Polanyi, we seek to approach a developmental vision as a mutual enrichment of the relations between society and nature. We propose that this pattern of development can be described as an intentional and continuous process of economic creation whose core would be the interconnection between cycles of natural and social reproduction rooted in urban everyday life, which we will call the socialization of nature. Finally, as an empirical illustration of our discussion, we analyze two situations in the Amazonian reality in which this vision of development can be glimpsed. Firstly through elements provided by the reappraisal of the long history of human presence in the Amazon and secondly by the analysis of the constitution of the açaí economy in Belém do Pará.