Biography
Laila Sandroni is a Post-Doc fellow at the Wildlife, Ecology, Management and Conservation Lab, University of São Paulo, as a part of the project entitled “Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Athropocene”, working on human-Jaguar interactions on the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Essentially transdiciplinary researcher in Political Ecology, she dedicated her academic and activist efforts to issues concerning the communication between science and policy, alternative paths to conservation based on social justice and relations between the humanities and natural sciences.
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laila-Sandroni
Abstract
Conservation at stake: causes and solutions for Atlantic forest biodiversity degradation in southern Bahia, Brazil
The construction of socially just paths to achieve biodiversity conservation is an urgent matter, specially in Brazil, home to an outstanding sociobiodiversity in extreme danger. This paper aims to map and analyze discourses related to biodiversity conservation trough comparing the environmental narratives of an indigenous people and the NGO/scientific/state sector that implements conservation projects in a specific territory in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in southern Bahia. This rainforest was the most affected ecosystem by the colonization process, and so were the indigenous peoples who live in it. In the territory we are focusing, the Brazilian State has delimited an Indigenous Land (Terra Indígena Tupinambá de Olivença) and two protected areas: an extremely restrictive Biological Reserve and a controversial Wildlife Refugee, which is restrictive and allows human occupation at the same time. In the past few years, there have been conflicts involving the indigenous population, mainly because the Tupinambá are being fined for developing traditional agriculture inside the protected areas. From a foucauldian perspective, we compare the environmental narratives of the indigenous leaders and cultivators and that of the group we call ‘environmentalists’ conformed by a diverse set of actors with an extremely coherent discourse. We argue that each group shares a common understanding of the causes for biodiversity degradation, which by it’s turn results in specific visions on the solutions for it. We finally make the case of the importance to face the challenges of managing real combinations between different sets of knowledge and narratives, taking into account power relations.
Affiliation: University of São Paulo, Brazil