Photos illustrating people from Siribinha – an artisanal fishing community in Brazil – interacting with nature. In the center, a child plays with a boat in the mangrove. From left to right and from the top to the bottom: a shellfish gatherer in the mangrove, a woman cleaning freshly caught fish, fishermen pulling their wooden boat out of the sea, and fishes laid out to dry in the sun.
Photos taken by Beatriz Demasi Araujo. The people depicted in these photographs have authorized the use of their image.

By Beatriz Demasi Araújo, Nina Garcia de Almeida Prado, Flávia Pereira Lima, Charbel N. El-Hani, and Renata Pardini.

Read the full paper here.

Socio-environmental conflicts are everywhere, as different groups, communities and societies engage in different relationships with nature. Recognizing such conflicts is crucial as a first step to envision possible dialogues and articulate wise decision-making. Yet, this is not a trivial task. Doing so requires a tool that is multicultural and multidimensional, as human-nature relationships are complex and many conflicts involve culturally differentiated peoples. Such a tool should also result in qualitative descriptions of human-nature relationships to allow identifying the values and conflicts that emerge from them.

We developed a tool with these characteristics by putting together a recently proposed typology of seven elementary human-nature relational models based on social conventions held by social groups in distinct historical moments or across cultures, and a mixed quantitative-qualitative methodology from psychology. We then tested the utility of the tool to describe contrasting viewpoints about nature, as well as the emergent values attributed to nature and the roots of socio-environmental conflicts, by applying it to community members and researchers working together in an artisanal fishing community in Brazil.

The tool was successful in unveiling how socio-environmental pressures widespread in coastal regions around the world, as gentrification, have divided the local community in contrasting views for the future and values of nature. While some people whose occupations depend on outsiders wish to exploit and earn money with nature, others who depend exclusively on fishing, feel part of nature, fear that nature is under threat and see themselves fighting to protect it. It also unveiled that researchers hold different values and perspectives about nature, seen as equal to humans and having rights, but understand themselves as outsiders that are not part of local nature and should not dictate right and wrong to community members. All, however, shared the wish that the community does not grow into a city, and that people follow rules for nature to persist, a powerful starting point for collectively envisioning a desirable future. We believe our tool can be useful to help foster collective action within local communities to confront the complex socio-environmental changes they are suffering and that jeopardize biocultural diversity globally.