Brazilian Environmental History in a Geography Coursebook: Questions of Racism and Environmental Justice

Abstract

In this paper, we advance an interdisciplinary discussion which articulates environmental history with the teaching of Geography in Brazil by analyzing a series of language uses from a school coursebook. In order to achieve the proposed objectives, the methodological approach adopted in the research, based on the Bakhtinian discursive perspective, considered the extensive reading of the coursebook and the selection of statements that addressed the theme of environmental history, allowing a discursive analysis of selected excerpts through the identification of the dialogic relationships maintained with the socio-historical developments of the environmental history of Brazil. In this way, we reflect in the article on the forms of environmental racism produced in the interaction between nature and society through two agricultural models: that of agribusiness, and the one developed by quilombola and indigenous communities. The analysis underscores ways in which the coursebook aligns itself with the hegemonic discourses, thereby erasing a set of forms of resistance concerning a Brazilian environmental history.