Por uma História Ambiental da Formação Social do Extremo Sul da Bahia (1945-1972)
Marcio Soares Santos, Herbert Toledo Martins
Abstract
This brief essay argues in favor of the historical environmental investigation of a social formation. Considering the socio-environmental totality – natural environment, human action, social-nature interactions – it is understood that socio-economic and socio-cultural development cannot take place without causing direct and indirect environmental changes, with many different degrees of intensity. There is no human production without consequences for the natural and produced environments, as well as for the social being itself; as well as the organization of social life encounters obstacles in the existing environmental conditions. However, it is not enough to integrate nature into society. The natural environment must be recognized as an active dimension of social and historical organization. The predatory and systematic exploitation of the Atlantic Forest in the extreme south of Bahia was carried out by the action of loggers and farmers, between the 1940s and the beginning of the 1970s, a period of economic and social formation in the current extreme south of Bahia State. The hunting of "hardwood" for commercialization, and the incessant movement of expansion of the agricultural frontier in the southernmost portion of the Bahia State, a region in permanent contact with the Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais States, led to the mercantile constitution of the region. In a short time, farms, sawmills and lumber companies intensify the degradation of the Atlantic Forest. Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, forest devastation in the far south had already reached dramatic proportions. In this sense, the present work seeks to indicate some theoretical questions of the study of a particular social formation, the extreme south of Bahia, through environmental history. Sources for this research are: theoretical literature on environmental history, texts on the extreme south and official statistical sources on the region.