ABSTRACT
The environmental eld as a contemporary social phenomenon can be considered a eld of ecological praxis, a political and institutional space for the environmental debate (Zhouri 1998; Carneiro 2005). This notion was reinterpreted from the concept of “eld” conferred by Bourdieu (2007) to the juridical and political elds, meaning a social space of differentiations, forces, and power disputes between the involved agents. In this perspective, the environmental eld has its own political and juridical rules and a particular structure, being composed of actors who are organized around the issue of the ethical belief of nature as an asset* (Carvalho 2001). Currently, the environmental eld has the dominant ideology of “sustainable development,” which is the doxa† that has been guiding the society-environment
CONTENTS
22.1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 395 22.2 Meanings and Social Projects in a Tropical Dry Forest: The
Vision from the Actors in Conict .......................................................... 399 22.3 Territorialization Processes: The Construction of the
“Vazanteiros in Movement” .....................................................................403 22.4 Final Considerations .................................................................................. 407
relationship for the past 25 years. Such doxa, forged in the context of re-emergence of a market economy and neoliberal policies in the late 1970s, by the eco-development, served as a source and paradigm of the environmental policies. The eco-development puts forth the Radical Ecology proposals and combines them with developmental proposals, taking on more conciliatory features of environmentalism and combining them with the practices of capitalist exploitation of nature. In this perspective, the environmental dimension would integrate with successful economic planning that considers the conditions and potential of ecosystems and wise management of resources (Sachs 1993).
