Social Equity and Environmental Politics in Brazil: Lessons from the Rubber Tappers of Acre

Abstract

For two decades, representatives of third world countries have argued in international fora that poverty pollutes more noxiously than does development.' From the IUCN's World Conservation Strategy in 1980 to the Brundtland Commission report and the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, environmentalist manifestoes increasingly incorporated developmental concerns.2 The notion of sustainable development linked environmental conservation with economic growth and later increasingly with social equity.3 In practice, the connections have been difficult to sustain. As long as poor people were seen mainly as causes, however inadvertent, of environmental degradation, solutions were unlikely to be of their own making. At the end of the 1980s, however, in several well-publicized cases, including the one discussed here, advocates began to portray poor people as protagonists, even leaders, in seeking solutions. The story of how and why this inversion occurred is a fascinating example of the social construction of an issue and shows the relationship between strategic acts of image making, alliance building, and the seizing of institutional opportunities. The political configuration of environmental and social conflicts and those attempting to address them vary considerably among and within countries. Connections are not always self-evident, nor are they self-activating. They are at least in part constituted by the social actors involved. When environmentalists began to call for growth with equity, they moved onto terrain already occupied by labor and social movement activists who were not sure what to make of them. The reinterpretation of long-standing struggles for social justice through an environmental lens has had profound implications for the resources and strategies available to their protagonists. Similarly, attempts to meld social and environmental agendas have been a major challenge for environmentalists. Although it is not unusual for social movements to adapt to new situations, blending old struggles with new and developing new strategies for approaching them, the approximation discussed here is unusual for two reasons. First, it involves sets of actors who normally espouse different visions of such fundamental questions as the relationship between humans and nature and the primacy of material and nonmaterial struggles. Second, it has involved a great deal of self-conscious negotiation, not only of alliances and strategies, but also of these fundamental conceptions. Activists trying to build these relationships frequently rely on stories about struggles where environmental and equity considerations are joined. These stories help to build a frame in which apparently contradictory meanings and demands dissolve and diverse struggles become one. This process of frame alignment (in the sense that David Snow and his colleagues use the term) addresses not only participants and potential participants, but also broader publics who can be expected to respond to one or another element in the stories.