Crise Ambiental e Modernidade - Instituto de Psicologia da UFRJ

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Abstract
Nowadays, the global environment crisis imposes chalenges to science and politics
simultaneously. The politicians, used to humans subjects, find themselves obliged to
include the environment in their decisions, while science moves from the labs to public
debates about impredictable objects and ambiguous issues, such as the global climatic heat.
Both demands done to science and politics come from a structural change in the civilizing
process. This process was represented by modernity as a man’s control over nature,
considered a wild and exterior space. Today, this scene is the oppositive: the preservation
of the environment causes struggles among the men. This change of nature from an exterior
place to the interior of society, as it presents itself as a distance from modernity, is the
subject of this work. Such process will be investigated under three points. At first, we try to
understand the emergence of the environment crisis from the engine of the modernity
itself. Therefore, the modern features treated in the first chapter ⎯ nature exteriority, future
previsibility and criticism ⎯ are taken back in the second chapter, as their consequent
process. This move leads to socialization of nature, manufacturing of risks, and to extension
of criticism, elements that insert the environment crisis in the present. Then, two
antagonized ways of setings the environment problems are analysed. These two ways share
the fact of not taking into account the fusion between nature and society: the deep ecology
and the modernizing perspective. At last, the conceptual implications of the hybridization
between nature and society on History, science and culture are studied.