Book, Social death of rivers, A: nature-culture conflict in the Amazon[LS]

Time has proven the success and acuteness of Mauro Leonel's work, which twenty years ago already demonstrated that environmental and economic issues were complementary and required an innovative response. The first decade of this century did bring progress, but in the last ten years social and economic tensions have been worsening year by year with the abandonment of the preservationist agenda and the revival of extractive policies and attacks on forests. In this new edition, Leonel directs his pen against the irresponsibility of a government that more than suspects opposes economic development to the responsible preservation of the natural environment. The result is known: rupture, poverty and social inequality. The publication of A Morte Social dos Rios, already in its first edition, became a milestone by breaking the superficial consensus existing in environmentalist discourse around ideas such as sustainable development that would benefit everyone or the consequences of devastation and pollution that would harm everyone. It showed that, far from that, the losers and winners of this clash had a well-defined identity and social status. Two decades later, we have witnessed great advances in the legal, economic and socio-political aspects of our relationship with the environment. In recent years, however, reactionary hostility disguised as discourse in favor of economic growth equates science and environmental concern with obstacles to development and disregards all the experience recently acquired by our societies on how to progress and preserve. Hence the importance of republishing this work in a new updated and expanded edition, in which Mauro Leonel, contextualizing with rigor and clarity the socio-environmental problem among us, continues, in a brilliant way, to do justice to Pierre Bordieu's maxim that it is of social nature the permanent struggle to say what is social.