Beyond the giddens's paradox: The social construction of nature and the environment

Reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) point to a variety of possible scenarios of global climate change if the emission levels of gases causing the greenhouse effect maintain the current pace. This network of scientists, environmentalists and political actors, alert to the possibility of widespread water resources shortages, the reduction in agricultural income and food production, the Amazon system collapse, the tropical forests definitive extinction, the large glaciers melting, the biodiversity crisis, the rising temperatures and the spread of extreme weather events and, consequently, the transformation of considerable human contingent on environmental refugees. Why do not we do anything? One of the explanations for the absence of concrete actions of individuals in relation to the environmental crisis is precisely Giddens's Paradox, which postulates that by a series of explanatory factors characteristic of post-traditional societies, political and usual actions will only be carried out when there is no possibility of significant anthropogenic influence on climate change events. The perspective of this research seeks to critically examine this explanatory category through an empirical research in the city of Brotas (São Paulo, Brazil) which works with an approach where the conceptions of nature and environment are social constructions locally sited and originated by social distinction process performed by agents in specific contexts. The existence of the environmental ethos, of the concern about the crisis of ecosystems, and of the lack of practical action in relation to discussions of climate change should be linked to territorial dynamics, to political, economic and social arrangements of certain localities, to the differentiation processes between social classes, and to the an interactional complex of identities construction.