Nos caminhos de Lund: significações sobre paleontologia e educação ambiental

Abstract

Paleontology is a current science that can situate human existence in the context of the global environmental crisis, in the face of inequalities and socio-environmental conflicts that occur in Brazilian sites of paleontological importance, such as those located at the Peter Lund Cave Route (Rota das Grutas Peter Lund) – RGPL, in Minas Gerais. However, the knowledge of the communities located in these sites is often made invisible, issues and socio-environmental conflicts are silenced, with a loss of the feeling of belonging. Thus, it is necessary to understand how the discourses of local communities can insinuate the socio-environmental relations that emerge in these locations, announcing these territories in terms of scientific, daily and educational significance, as well as environmental issues or conflicts, vulnerabilities and socioenvironmental injustices. In the context of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic views on Environmental Education and Paleontology, I propose, for this thesis, to open myself to the exercise of weaving relationships between both fields, with the contribution of Political Ecology, Environmental Justice and decolonial studies, in addition to the discussions around the Anthropocene, the “new global epoch”. In order to understand the ways of meaning of the discourses that are part of the RGPL and the surrounding communities, about Paleontology, its sense of belonging and its daily life, its meanings about socio-environmental issues and about Environmental Education - EA, I use the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis – ACD for the analysis of discursively situated samples, since I consider the role of language essential to this work. I also bring Walter Benjamin to the discussion, in an attempt to better understand the problems of modernity and the discourses that take part in it. Through the analysis of the Informative Educational Material - MEI collected in the caves, the answer to questionnaires sent to the environmental monitors and interviews by video calls with local residents, I opened myself to the field, in a discursive research. As a result, I could notice that the analyzed dimensions have a strong connection with each other, with the origin of the subjects influencing the meanings they weave in relation to Paleontology and their belonging. Subjects who demonstrate a critical stance on local environmental issues, in their various forms. These problems, which often end up victimizing the sense of belonging, are sometimes hidden by an EA that is still conservative and uncritical, distant from the local reality. But these connections also showed that there are emancipatory potentials through a greater link between Paleontology and EA, which considers an ecology of knowledges that are politicized, contextualized and transformative. Finally, the connections located here proved to be references for the fight against social inequality in paleontological sites and for the inclusion of their communities in participatory management.