Memória coletiva dos desastres ambientais na cidade do Crato, Ceará

Abstract

Environmental disaster risk management involves ongoing actions to address threats with institutional support and the participation of the communities involved. These actions are based on the idea that risks and disasters are distributed unevenly across geographic space and affect the population differently (Acselrad, 2010). To discuss environmental risk management, we located the risk areas of Encosta do Seminário and Rio Granjeiro in the city of Crato, Ceará, with the aim of understanding environmental disasters based on the memories constructed by people who have experienced landslides and floods. We draw attention to the need for studies on environmental disasters that bring together the affected individuals to think of effective ways to prevent, manage, and reduce the risks arising from environmental disasters. We question the formats and effectiveness of addressing environmental risks that have been or are being adopted in the affected communities. It is hypothesized that planning and public policies have not considered the experiences and experiences of individuals living in areas of environmental risk and in conditions of high social vulnerability. We point out that people's memories of experienced environmental disasters leave their mark on the collective memory, which is a significant tool for understanding and planning actions aimed at Education for Disaster Risk Reduction - ERRD. Collective memory is a set of memories constructed from a process of reconstruction of the past lived and experienced by a given social group. It is a tool that allows for a collective understanding of processes, since remembrance goes beyond what the individual remembers; memories are collective, they are part of the memory of the group to which they belong (Halbwachs, 1990). As methodological procedures, we considered the following actions in the field of oral history: field studies, with visits to the 09 (nine) risk areas mapped by the Mineral Resources Research Company - CPRM (2014) and the 02 (two) areas chosen in this research, which were presented by the Municipal Civil Defense of Crato; delimitation of the study areas due to their presence of the largest number of properties and people at risk; study of written documentary sources: Master Plan of the Municipality of Crato and reports from CPRM (2014) and the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters - CEMADEN; and research in oral documentary sources, with semi-structured interviews with four collaborators who had experience with environmental disasters and action research procedures based on two extension projects with actions for ERRD. The collaborators' narratives showed significant knowledge about environmental/climate dynamics, human actions and the absence of public power, so necessary to understand risk situations, ways of acting and preventing exposure to dangers in the face of environmental disasters. The collaborators' narratives expressed the reality experienced, the recognition of risk situations through the sieve of memories and their repercussions on memory. The memories constructed with the actions on the ground in the schools signaled other possible paths of discussion and practices for ERRD.