Percepção dos pescadores acerca dos impactos socioambientais decorrentes do processo de urbanização no entorno do lago do Juá, Santarém, Pará, Brasil

Abstract

This work consists of the analysis of the social and environmental impacts resulting from the urbanization process in Juá lake, located seven kilometers from Santarém’s central zone, Pará State. From the point of view of the local fishermen, the effects of the urbanization process have deeply affected the potential of that ecosystem as the fishing stock and, consequently, the main economic activity of that lacustrine community, the artisanal fishing. The research will use a theoretical conceptual framework obtained by the studies of Political Ecology, identifying the social actors and the environmental resources involved, allied to the theoretical-conceptual support of environmental perception, of fundamental importance to understand the interrelations between man and the environment, their expectations, longings, satisfactions and dissatisfactions, judgments and behaviors in relation to the space where they are inserted. In the field, it was used the ethnographic method supported by participant observation, using informal and semi-structured interviews, in order to describe the fishermen's perception of the socioenvironmental impacts caused by exogenous actions that degraded the fishing space. It was also outlined the economic, social and cultural importance of that ecosystem to the community, since as the environment is being compromised by the intense urbanization process and fishermen fear for the extinction of fishing activity in the lake. It was found at the end of the research that the human intervention directly affected the water and the fish of the lake transforming this social process into a socioenvironmental problem that directly affected the modus vivendi of the fishermen who survive from the artisanal fishing in the lake.