are threatened, says study)’, BBC News, 5 June, <https://www.bbc.com/ portuguese/ brasil-48504317>, accessed 22 July 2019.
McGrath, M. (2019). ‘Deforestation: Tropical tree losses persist at high levels’, BBC News, 25 April, <https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48037913>, accessed 10 July 2019.
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Walt, S. M. (2019). ‘Who will save the Amazon (and how)?’, FP-Foreign Policy—The Magazine, 5 August, p. 1, <https:// foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/05/who-will-invade-brazil-to-save-the-amazon>, accessed 28 August 2019.
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1.1 Amazonia: Worldwide Material and Symbolic Representations
Amazonia is strategic to Brazil and mankind. It raises a number of important issues to the world, with emphasis on the following: its participation in the construction of a new aesthetic concept for mankind, its sustainable development as the world’s largest open living library, as a strategic space belonging to Brazil and the world, as a means to renew the planet, as the planet’s thermostat, and as the planet’s climate stability mechanism. These meanings of Amazonia’s material and symbolic representations need to be understood by mankind so that we value nature and life at all times.
The possibility of the planet’s ecological instability reaffirms Amazonia’s worldwide importance. At this time, climate change is its main “driving force.” Amazonia’s cultural and environmental complexity qualifies and problematizes its inclusion in the world’s political and economic processes. Nature and culture, territories and peoples, economy and technological innovations, environmental services, and sustainable development are categories that drive the cycles of its physical and political existence. Its exploitation by predatory capitalist forces and its laboratory-like condition for great international scientific experiments have ←1 | 2→generated contradictions and controversies that create new world political tensions and diplomatic agendas. The emergence of sustainability has added new elements to this framework.
The invention of new industrial matrices, and the integration of communication networks with new forms of financial market organization and the technical occupations are indications of globalization processes. New world geopolitics and links between education, science, religion, and the financial market have radically changed our relationship with nature and society. The incorporation of sustainability within this framework and in people’s fictional imaginary has enhanced the creation of new tendencies and forms of social organization.
These broad issues direct the globalization of sustainability towards the economic, religious, and scientific foundations of the civilizing process, generating a new political and ethical centrality. This centrality promotes and appoints local enterprises, based on an ethical system installed on the structural revaluation performed on the basis of notions of value and rights. Value and the right to life; the intrinsic value of nature and environmental services; culture, nature, and symbolic value; individual rights and environmental preservation; collective rights; and international relations, among others, constitute controversial themes that underpin projects, research programs, public policies, and international agreements. Giving new meaning to the foundations, explanatory meanings, and operative mechanisms for the notion of value also requires reviewing approaches and evaluations of human beliefs and desires. In this context, three classic categories, truth-value, utility-value, and beauty-value (Latour and Lépinay, 2008) have been replaced by life-value, mankind-value, culture-value, and universe-value, more complex categories and with a greater heuristic range (Freitas et al., 2017). This new conformation of mankind enhances the sustainability ethic and Amazonia.
The globalization of hypocrisy and the political barbarity have fortified the ethic’s importance, considering sustainability as a universal paradigm. Its incorporation as a civilizing foundation demands changes in the relationships between man and nature, between nations, between consumers and the market, and between technical training institutions and national state organizations. Developed countries are redefining their productive and occupational matrices, assuming the paradigm of sustainability and its links with public policies and ecological issues. For this reason, national states are seeking to integrate science and technology with the market in an ethical perspective that values social promotion. This to require structural changes in teacher training in all fields of knowledge.
The sustainability ethic embraces different themes and programs designed for the production and construction of human life and of public policies, generating contradictions and ruptures between ecocentric and anthropocentric ←2 | 3→conceptions. This historical framework has weakened the public consensus based on sustainability’s regulatory guides and standardizations. It is now necessary to institute principles and criteria that guide the organization of methodologies and priorities for individual and collective classifications (Routley, 2007), from a perspective that considers culture to be imbricated in nature, and that it reaffirms the basic relations of this sustainability’s new ethic. An ethics guided by the brief period it has been associated with human needs and, simultaneously, by the extended period it has been articulated to the permanence of mankind and the planet (Meunier and Freitas, 2005). The fusion of mankind’s history to the history of matter enhances this ethical dimension according to which man does not behave as nature’s owner thus proposing to modify, internally, the predominant morals.
This new framework from the twenty-first century enhances social promotion and the protection of nature. National states and societies exert key roles in the proposed technical and judicial regulations, as well as in its political legitimatization. These changes are producing a new understanding of the concepts of economic development and citizenship. From the standpoint of social solidarity, its main causes are the structural changes in education, science, and technology. Ecology, climate change, and sustainable development gain prominence in this new world scenario.
Brazil as the primary environmental power in the twenty-first century and Amazonia as the primary world reference for sustainable development are central to this process, which raises new challenges in science education because of the planet’s environmental degradation. Today, there is a worldwide focus on new technologies related to the following themes: clean development mechanisms; environmental policies associated with climate change; management processes dealing with environmental education and culture; scientific and technological mechanisms applied to the biogeochemical cycles and environmental services; institutional strategies and methodologies applied to the preservation of landscapes; processes of land use, climate, and integrated management of ecosystems; and methodologies to use and integrate meteorological networks and water resources. Sustainable development is a key element in this process, as it proposes new forms of organization and relations between societies, national states, and man and
