Burning Reasons: Traditional Land Management Using Fire and Environmental Conflicts in Serra da Canastra National Park,
Several traditional communities in Brazil use fire as a constitutive element of their agricultural management system and such practice is, thus, an important aspect of their culture. However, government environmental agencies often regard traditional mana
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Burning Reasons: Traditional Land Management Using Fire and Environmental Conflicts in Serra da Canastra National Park, Minas Gerais, Brazil Emmanuel Duarte Almada, Ana Beatriz Vianna Mendes, and Aderval Costa Filho Abstract Several traditional communities in Brazil use fire as a constitutive element of their agricultural management system and such practice is, thus, an important aspect of their culture. However, government environmental agencies often regard traditional management using fire as a technique that should be overcome by management practices based on conservation biology. The imposition of environmental management regime forms based on modern science upon traditional communities’ cosmology results in significant impacts on the territory, not only on the people, but also on the environment. In this chapter, we present an investigation into the conflict between the traditional communities that live in Serra da Canastra National Park, located in southeastern Brazil, and the federal environmental agency, which claims to be responsible for biodiversity conservation in that area. Local ecosystems, predominantly savannas, have been managed by such communities over the last three centuries, and fire is considered by them a central element in the dynamics of the landscape, especially for the renewal of pastures. The establishment of a protected area in their territories, in 1972, and its expansion into other traditional areas, since 2005, resulted in several conflicts related to the management using fire, among other reasons. According to the communities’ reports, the new procedures imposed by the state aiming at restricting the use of fire as a management method has caused both an alteration of pasture areas and a decrease in local biodiversity. Although environmental agencies have recently begun to incorporate traditional knowledge about fire as a way to manage the territory, overcoming govE. D. Almada (*) Kaipora - Laboratory of Biocultural Studies, Department of Biological Sciences, Minas Gerais State University, Ibirité, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] A. B. V. Mendes · A. C. Filho Department of Anthropology and Archeology, School of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Arce Ibarra et al. (eds.), Socio-Environmental Regimes and Local Visions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49767-5_10
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ernmental reason remains a challenge, so as to ensure the territorial rights of traditional communities and the conservation of biodiversity. Keywords Brazilian savanna · Traditional ecological knowledge · Traditional management using fire · Protected area · Territorial rights
10.1 The Reasons for the Fire Many studies have showed the importance of fire as a fundamental element in the maintenance of ecological processes in several terrestrial ecosystems (Bond & Keeley, 2005). In Brazil, the Cerrado—and also the southern fields—are biomes with a long history of adaptation to fire, which i
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