Área de proteção ambiental do banhado grande : APABG : escolas, educação e preservação ambiental

Abstract

The history of Environmental Protection Area of Banhado Grande (APABG) - Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil - and how education and schools are inserting in this context, is focus on the present study. We rescue important historical aspects of APABG, establishing links between environmental, social, political, cultural and educational dimensions. This scenario was built between strain of scientific knowledge, communities life, myths about nature as well political and economic interests – a complex web of relationships and not always balanced. For this, we identify humans and nature relationships modes at time and space. Initially, we tried to recognize origins and paths that reinforce necessity of establishment of protected areas in world and implications for Brazil. Then, the study aimed: recognize how emergence of environmental conservation is improved by scientific knowledge; analyze the consequences of this emergency in environmental laws and policies; identify social and political actors that contributed for current legislation of protected areas and evaluate how education connects to this history. Finally, we explore the effects of this narrative in schools inside APABG, recognizing strengths and weaknesses of environmental education experiences. For reconstruction of APABG‟s history, we applied semi-structured interviews with actors involved in this scenario - even before its creation in 1998 - recovering fragments of a story present only in memory of these actors. We used documents that indicating clues about their origin to connect these fragments. Participative observations, document analysis, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations were performed at schools, in order to identify educational practices, ways to connect local nature and features of environmental education. We concluded that stories are intersected and connected, and narratives about APABG have great potential, but are not closed to new possibilities that may contribute to appreciation and care of this diverse environment.