Monitorando mudanças socioambientais: memórias ecológicas no Delta do São Francisco

Abstract

This study investigates socio-environmental transformations in the São Francisco Delta using the categories of ecological memory and a decolonial approach to understand the impacts of human actions on the ecosystem's balance and the lives of riverine communities. Anchored in an ethnographic approach, the study highlights how political, economic, and social decisions have shaped the region's environmental and social dynamics, exacerbating inequalities and promoting the degradation of the São Francisco River and its surroundings. The research explores how human and non-human memories act as living records of interactions between culture and nature. Through the narratives of riverine inhabitants and perceptible changes in the landscape, the study reveals the consequences of phenomena such as water salinization, biodiversity loss, and population displacement. These changes are directly linked to human interventions, such as dam construction, and the global impacts of climate change. Based on a decolonial perspective, the work deconstructs traditional approaches that privilege Western and anthropocentric interpretations, proposing a framework that integrates humans and non-humans as interdependent agents. This approach reveals that the effects of ecological crises are unevenly distributed, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable communities, such as quilombola groups, fishers, and farmers in the São Francisco Delta. The study also sheds light on the resilience of these communities, evident in their strategies of adaptation and resistance in the face of adversity. The categories of ecological memory and decoloniality are central to understanding how historical, social, and environmental relationships shape everyday experiences, enabling a critical analysis of development practices that overlook sustainability and social justice. Thus, the study concludes that ecological crises are, at their core, human and political crises, requiring an ethical, inclusive, and transformative approach to reconcile development with preservation, culture with nature, and past with future.