Os desafios de uma sociedade que se globaliza : um estudo em Barcarena, estado do Pará.

Abstract

This study presents an analysis about the social and environmental effects of modernization in Barcarena (PA), putting forward the discussion about the challenges and the reactions of an Amazonian society. The methodology includes a literature review and a survey developed in the municipality of Barcarena, State of Pará, from April 2011 to May 2012. The research is based on a qualitative approach and there is used the dialectical method and the theory of "Risk Society", according to the discourse of the sociologist Ulrich Beck. This study emphasizes the reflexive modernity with its concepts and interaction in the environment, highlighting the Brazilian Amazon in a setting of changes and challenges to environmental sustainability. A process that involves the State of Pará and, consequently, Barcarena, a municipality with a trajectory related to the plans of development and modernization for the Amazon. In this municipality are identified territorial issues, risk situations and, gradually, reactions of local civil society in struggles and demands. These dilemmas demonstrate the mobilization for a discussion and citizenship forum, proposing integrated participation of the Barcarena society, the public authorities and the industrial and economic sectors. A wish that results from the situations experienced, seeking for institutional responses, requiring instruments that enable a new style of development that can integrate, simultaneously, social, environmental and economic sustainability in the region. There is a society in Barcarena that has been reacting, through a discursive way, to the problems of a whole, it identifies itself with a global risk society, with needs of dialogue and of responses increasingly urgent and thoughtful.