Unidades de conservação e sociedades sustentáveis: a educação ambiental desenvolvida nas UC da Costa do Descobrimento - BA

Abstract

Environmental transformations, caused by human actions in recent centuries, have awakened society's attention to the need to build alternatives for the future. In the fight against the socio-environmental crisis that affects us all; two strategies are gaining ground on the national scene: Environmental Education and Protected Areas. The complexity of socioeconomic and environmental relationships demands that Environmental Education occur in a critical and transformative way, going beyond environmental information. Protected Areas are more than “nature reserves”, they are spaces with great educational potential and incorporating Environmental Education into their values and practices helps them to develop this role. The ‘Costa do Descobrimento’ in Bahia, Northeast Brazil, is a territory that presents different socio-environmental conflicts and several Protected Areas. In this work, through the analysis of management documents, interviews with subjects that play a fundamental role in the construction and implementation of these practices and a multi-response model questionnaire to be answered by these subjects, we analyzed the practices of Environmental Education intended and developed in these PA, and the conceptions of the managers and/or those responsible for these units about these practices. In addition to surveying actions carried out, through Discursive Textual Analysis, we seek to understand how the concepts Environmental Education, Environment and Sustainability are presented and the influence of these conceptions on the practices found. We identified 33 Protected Areas, many of which were created and not effectively implemented. Due to the structural conditions in which Protected Areas and environmental policies find themselves, most Protected Areas have managed to do little beyond protecting their boundaries. The objectives of the Protected Areas analyzed and of Environmental Education in these spaces are in line with the hegemonic vision of Sustainable Development, away from a critical perspective, prioritizing a strictly ecological approach to the socio-environmental crisis. This scenario configures that the Environmental Education present in the Protected Areas of the ‘Costa do Descobrimento’ presents a limited contribution in the construction of the paths of Transition to Sustainable Societies. If Environmental Education in Protected Areas aims to transform the world in the sense of exiting the socio-environmental crisis; it needs to abandon a strictly ecological, banking and reproductive approach. We recommend the development of training processes in Environmental Education from this perspective, both for the general public and for directors and staff responsible for Protected Areas