O Agroecossistema do lago do Janauacá, AM: cultivando vida e saberes

Abstract

The economic benefits of globalized development have been conquered at a high cost: the degradation of global ecosystems, with loss of a significant part of their biodiversity and ecosystem services, threatening the integrity of these systems and the survival of all those directly and indirectly dependent on them. The solution of this existential problem might be found in the ancestral knowledge and praxis of the peoples who occupy the world's ecosystems today and still take advantage of their common goods and services in a sustainable way. In this thesis, I studied the ancestral knowledge and praxis of the inhabitants of the Janauacá Lake, an agroecosystem on the floodplain of the Solimões/Amazon River. I investigated the geological and biological origin of the lake and the anthropic transformations, beginning in the pre-colonial period, that transformed the lake into a fluvial agroecosystem. I also investigated the origins of the ancestral knowledge conserved by the local community, constructed since prehistoric times by indigenous peoples who interacted with this and other Amazonian systems. The current residents of the lake were shown to possess a vast ancestral knowledge of the local ecosystems that they still use to exploit the common goods and services of these systems in a sustainable manner. Most attempts to introduce new cultivars into the lake or to commercialize and explore existing common goods and services at an intensity beyond the productive capacity of the system, following Western scientific and economic models, have proven fruitless. It was concluded that: 1) ancestral knowledge still offers the best technical-scientific basis for the use of ecosystem goods and services in the agroecosystem of Lake Janauacá, especially when they are destined for local community consumption, 2) the commercialization of these products and services at larger scales will only be feasible with a strict control on the intensity of exploitation by the local residents to avoid exceeding the productive limits of the ecosystem and 3) if this local control is carried out on a world scale, including all the local ecosystems exploited by global markets, it is possible to imagine a globalized market, meeting the demand of all the urban populations of the world, that would finally be sustainable or, as Morin (2013) would say, a sustainable Unitas multiplex planetarius.