Luciana Lang
Title of dissertation
Once there were fishermen: ethics, social natures and an urban mangrove
Abstract
This is a study about a mangrove in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Constituted by river and sea water, sewage and material waste, this breeding ground for crabs, herons and many different types of bacteria invites a multitude of readings.
More specifically, this thesis looks at the broad range of ethical sensibilities towards this urban mangrove, at what informs those sensibilities, and at how they may have changed as the mangrove became a protected area and entered what I call the ‘environmental assemblage’.
The study unveils the following pattern around the mangrove. Up until the 1970s it was a source of livelihood and a place for communal activities. An oil spill disaster made it the locus of a grass-roots movement in the 80s and 90s.
After being granted the legislative status of protected area, it fell silent and marginal as levels of pollution increased, becoming associated with illicit activities, and being subsequently locked up for public access.
I argue that, as the mangrove passed from ‘nature’ to ‘environment’, people perceived it changing both as a thing and as a concept, and found creative ways of holding on to its thingness, and to meanings associated with it.
The fashioning of new practices around the mangrove sparked a tension between old ethical values, and new ones found in the broader environmental assemblage.
The findings also suggest that environmentalism, in its many variations, is far from providing a single, universal moral framing. Instead, the mangrove is assembled differently according to economic, political, religious, and personal pursuits, and is enacted based on ethical choices that are often at odds with the underlying principles of the environmental governance currently in place.
Research themes
Political ecology; environmental ethics; social natures; nostalgia; waste; Umbanda; assemblages; social movement.