Strategies and Difficulties in Living Alongside a Channel: From Spontaneous Strategies to Publicization

Abstract

Social inequality has been one of the motives for the exacerbation of environmental risks among more vulnerable social groups, especially regarding their forcible occupation of riverbanks and flood plains. Therefore, their environmental vulnerability is increased due to climate change that tends to intensify rainfall regimes, just as their socioeconomic conditions also suffer owing to a reduced capability to adapt. As a partial result of the master’s thesis, this article proposes an analysis of the strategies and difficulties of two communities in situations of social and environmental vulnerability, since they live on the banks of the Costa Channel, a manmade waterway that runs through a mostly middle-class neighborhood called Itapoã, Vila Velha (Espírito Santo state, Brazil). The research was developed using the method of ethnographic inspiration and the implementation of individual and group interviews during the year 2015. In the same period, attending the meetings of the neighborhood residents’ association helped to better understand how local leaders are involved in the problems faced by those groups. First of all, by exposing their spontaneous strategies of prevention and adaptation, one resorts to the description and analysis of the way in which they are to cope, particularly, with floods. Through such work, we seek to highlight sensations, feelings and social and political conditions that underlie the taking of private actions and the naturalization of those events, hampering if not impeding the publicization of such a problem. Finally, the situations presented contribute to indicate that periodic events tend to change people’s usual behavior, but the situation of vulnerability and environmental injustice in which they find themselves does not contribute to promote their association in order to publicize such problems.