Climate Emergency and Transformation of Rural Areas: Eruption of ecological critiques and justifications in social conflicts in the São Paulo countryside

Abstract

In the last few decades, the worsening of the global climate crisis has constituted new challenges for environmental and social sciences, especially in the mobilization of theoretical-methodological approaches capable of explaining the socioecological complexity of the problem. The current study comprises an effort in this sense, guided by the following question: “How do climate emergencies affect the social and political order in modernity in times of climate emergency or global risk society?”. The objective is to explain how the new socioecological issues have impacted the disputes around the Agrarian Reform in the country. For this purpose, a case study was carried out in the Mário Lago settlement, Ribeirão Preto/SP, whose justification is based on defense of the environment, especially on protecting the waters of the Guarani Aquifer. In addition to that, the sociology of justifications and the sociology of metamorphoses were adopted as theoretical assumptions. For composition of the data corpuses, 16 interviews were carried out in the life report model, with actors involved in the socioecological valuation of the settlement, as well as the monitoring of disputes in local public arenas. The strategies for the production of diverse veracity evidence that provides the basis for the discourses justifying the ecological option mobilized by the MST were also analyzed. It is concluded that the socioecological principles have been consolidated as a new functionality of Agriculture, representing a significant social and political force in disputes around the Agrarian Reform, considering the case of the state of São Paulo in particular.