A educação ambiental na formação de lideranças jovens em territórios atingidos pela mineração: o desastre como negócio e o empreendedorismo como propósito

Abstract

The economic and political imposition of mining on territories has emerged as a form of power in capitalism through neoliberal policy with a partly discursive character. This is especially evident after major socio-environmental disasters, such as the Fundão dam collapse in the Mariana region in 2015, which resulted in the creation of a new organization: the Renova Foundation. In this way, the thesis of this research argues that the collapse of the Fundão dam highlighted a particular facet of capital: the commodification of disasters. In turn, it also argues that corporate education, mediated by environmental education, has sought to guide people to adapt to disasters along the lines of entrepreneurship. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis, I highlight as a social problem the corporate discursive meanings of mining in environmental educational projects in territories affected by the socioenvironmental disaster resulting from the collapse of the Fundão dam. The Renova Foundation, through the training of Youth Leaders, reveals this potential in the educational mobilization of practices and discourses oriented by mining business values, reverberating on a neoliberal ideological and hegemonic strategy that can lead to a prescriptive, individualized and entrepreneurial environmental education, which promotes an intellectual and moral assimilation of young people towards complacency in relation to the disaster. The following research questions arise from this problem: What interests motivate the Renova Foundation to train young leaders in the affected territories? What discursive meanings guide the Environmental Education Program aimed at these young people? Is it possible to identify, among the young people, discourses that perpetuate or challenge the ideological and hegemonic function of the Renova Foundation? The aim of this study is to understand the discursive meanings of environmental education through the Jupiter Project, the Renova Foundation's Youth Leadership Training program, in the first territories affected by mining, specifically analyzing the discursive enunciations of the young participants, as well as the presence or contestation of the corporate mining discourses made by them. Documentary materials and semi-structured interviews with young participants were used as the corpus. The documents revealed an emphasis on three discourses that produce meanings about environmental education from the perspective of education for sustainable development: resilience as a path to sustainability, youth protagonism and limited autonomy, emphasizing the individual's ability to adapt to adversity and to find socio-environmental solutions in line with business values through environmental education projects. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the young people identified with business discourse, with an emphasis on management techniques and entrepreneurship. Another aspect was the self-identification of young people as leaders in solving local socio-environmental problems, showing the internalization of roles in generating results. This discourse prioritized small educational social practices with a technical and individualized dimension in dealing with complex difficulties in their territories. Other discourses emerged in resistance to the dominant discourses: the young people exposed knowledge as other ways of mobilizing to face the problems intrinsic to the dam collapse. However, in contradicting the hegemonic discourse of the Renova Foundation, they were constrained by the corporate mining discourse in denying their ways of knowing, acting and being.