Ambiente Degradado e Infância Vulnerável: apropriação, uso e significação das crianças sobre a Lagoa da Francesa em Parintins/AM

Abstract

This paper starts from a social environmental reality very present in Brazilian cities and especially in Amazon. It means the water course degradation that water or surrounds the urban space. In these spaces, preserved areas before, today they seem more waste material area and all type of pollution. However the social life there still remains for a low resource population. The study is on The Lagoa da Francesa (LF) located in the central area in the town of Parintins/Am. Despite of the lamentable state of pollution, the LF is still the arrivals and departure areas of passengers and load from the rural zone of the municipality and from the state of Pará and even so the lake works as recreational place for children who reside in the surroundings. The incredulity of outside people seem don`t be compatible with those use the lake in many ways. From this constatation, this paper does a clipping to investigate the environmental perception of LF surrounding resident children. In particular, it has sought to characterize the physical environment of the LF, and to identify the way of it uses by the children as the attribution of meanings they give to this water resource. This qualitative approach research was developed from the use of drawings and Piagetian clinical interviews from the graphic representation. Participated 120 children (60 girls and 60 boys), from both genders, between 07 and 13 years old, regularly enrolled in two public schools in the Lagoa surroundings. From the analyses it has noticed that children perceive the LF of different ways that constitute six space categories: a) Pollution area; b) Commerce area; c) Residence area; d) Recreation area; e) Flooding area; f) Traffic area. These ways of thinking produced positive, negative and neutral valences, which mean either feeling of attachment and distance or apathy feelings. The data was quantified by the statistical Kruskal-Wallis test, which has sought to know if children have similarities among them or not, and in contrast, the average of valences to perceive the possible differences and similarities between the quantitative and qualitative data. These results display angles which remain in decisions of social use of the LF and alert us that some implicit environmental perceptions to certain uses of children, putting risk at their health, physical and social security.