We look at a mountain landscape, covered in green and water. You can imagine the noise of the rapids, the animals around; the sky that, on this day, prepares for the rain. This is Ceará, Ubajara National Park, Brazilian Caatinga region. The photo shows one of the so-called “altitude marshes”, islands of humid vegetation that shelter springs and serve as a refuge for wild animals during dry periods. Not all of the Caatinga is like this, it's true, but that's also how the Caatinga is. The difficult association is because we are used to thinking of the Caatinga only as the poetic hinterland, a semi-arid region of Brazil, where drought and social problems prevail. This narrative has implications discussed by biologist Amanda Sousa Silvino in her doctoral thesis, defended in the Environment and Society program, linked to the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH).
The thesis “Conservation of the Caatinga between political arenas in the Brazilian semi-arid region” was financed by FAPESP and developed at the Center for Environmental Studies and Research (NEPAM) under the guidance of professor Lúcia da Costa Ferreira.
According to Amanda, the image of the Caatinga as an inhospitable region is propagated by several social actors. This legitimizes actions focused on the conservation of soil and water resources, which prioritize social aspects related to drought and aimed at the “semi-arid”, but without recognizing the riches and potential of the region, this is one of the implications studied in the thesis. “I realized that the term semi-arid is like a big umbrella that shades the entire region. When I talk about the northeast, about the Caatinga, I have the semi-arid as a guide for reasoning. It refers to discourses about drought, desertification, water scarcity, and how communities can live better in the face of drought. When the drought ends and the rain comes, it is as if this semi-arid region ceases to exist”, explains the author.
The drought narrative would then lose its meaning. “It is not said much that there are intense and torrential rains, that there is a period when the Caatinga becomes green and that at that moment, animals, flora and fauna are in a moment of intense reproduction and that communities plant and have their production animal and vegetable”, he adds.
The researcher works with the concept of “political arenas”, social spaces where actors compete for their interests. She found that one of the oldest and historically consolidated political arenas would be linked to the drought narrative, more concerned with the social issues involved and less with the environmental issue. “My thesis was to try to understand how the issue of conservation began to be claimed for this environment historically seen more through the lens of drought, which moves an entire political structure. Understand beyond this bias that the Caatinga has an 'evil' that needs to be remedied with major works or solutions that try to alter or bring other qualities to the region, different from its natural quality, which is to go through times of drought”.
The Caatinga is one of six Brazilian biomes alongside the Amazon, Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal and Pampa. The administrative division into biomes was made by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in 2004, and generated, in the researcher's opinion, demands for specific public policies for each biome. She states that initially the policies focused on the Amazon and Atlantic Forest biomes. However, the scientific community, associated with other biomes, began to demand actions aimed at the biomes in which they operated. It was when Caatinga conservation networks began to form, constituting this other, more recent political arena, proposing another conservation strategy that deals with the preservation of species and biological diversity.
The biodiversity movement operates within the scope of the Caatinga biome and not from the concept of semi-arid. “In this case, environmentalists want to show the side of the humid Caatinga with the concern of addressing biodiversity conservation policies and species preservation.” It is a movement that is still poorly articulated, in the author's opinion. “Including internationally. When you have, for example, the construction of a hydroelectric plant in the Amazon generating serious environmental impacts on a river with an indigenous community, the issue quickly becomes international news. But a million-dollar project like the transposition of the São Francisco River, which will also have impacts, and for the only perennial river in an entire region, this does not have repercussions outside the country in the same way”.
The tension generated in the meeting of the two arenas, or political spaces, was studied in the thesis. “My research discusses how at different levels of social action actors organize themselves, talk about the Caatinga and demand environmental conservation”. Amanda believes that the Caatinga needs a broader meaning than that which sees it only as a semi-arid region.
Made up of highly populated areas, the Caatinga is also very rich from a social point of view. “Many communities intensively use natural resources, such as firewood for energy and open pasture for animal husbandry. They are communities close to each other and already well consolidated.” It is a situation that, again, differs from the Amazon region. “In the Amazon, there is an agricultural frontier being opened with large fires and deforestation. Deforestation in the Caatinga is pulverized and occurs when communities open the forests, as if it were deforestation from the inside out”.
During her work, the researcher participated in several events that discussed the direction of policies aimed at the region, with the aim of observing people's narratives and in an attempt to map the groups involved in environmental conservation. In addition, she conducted interviews. “Environmentalists and scientists defend the diversity of the Caatinga and the creation of more conservation units. I went to understand how the Caatinga is talked about in spaces that are not just for conservationists, where coexistence with the semi-arid region is debated”, she points out. According to Amanda, several environmentalists are today mobilized in this perspective of thinking about the place alongside the climatic phenomenon of droughts.
Within the issue of biodiversity, today endemism is discussed, an important argument for conserving the diversity of the Caatinga. “Endemics include species adapted to the environmental conditions of the region, such as the nine-banded armadillo, an iconic species from which several other species are also intended to be conserved.” According to official data, says Amanda, up to 48% of the Caatinga has already been devastated and, even though it seems counter-intuitive, the issue of climate change could place the Caatinga on another level in the preservation scenario, since the biodiversity debate is on the agenda in climate agenda around the world.
Amanda considers that the development of the Caatinga needs to take into account the specificities of each place. “The research tried to bring a more political and sociological look to the Caatinga. Nature conservation is a political decision and a complex social process, it is a political conflict that involves multiple social layers, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The most important thing is to understand conservation as an extremely complex social dispute.”