[O]brigam as palavras: sentidos históricos de natureza nas legislações ambientais mineiras (1954 – 1999)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the environmental legislation of the State of Minas Gerais between 1954 and 1999, taking 92 state laws as historical sources in order to abstract the historical meanings of nature through an environmental historiographical reading. The research is based on the assumption that such meanings do not reside in the legal texts themselves, but become legible through an analytical operation that confronts the legal norm with political and institutional contexts, as well as with environmental materiality. The methodological path articulates the political contours of the environmental question, legislative processes and their discursive threads, the legal ordering of the natural world, and the analysis of the verbs in the legal summaries as historical operators of meaning. This reading is organized into three analytical levels proposed by Donald Worster: at level I, nature is considered as materiality and territory; at level II, social mediations are examined, with emphasis on production, economy, and use; at level III, the legal-institutional translation of the environmental is analyzed through law, management, and control. From this approach, the dissertation demonstrates that the meanings of nature historically legible in Minas Gerais legislation are marked by the centrality of the state apparatus and by the persistence of an anthropic rationality, in which environmental protection appears in a fragmented, weak, and permissive form. By historicizing these norms, the work contributes to the historiographical debate on the limits and shortcomings of environmental legislation, as well as to reflections on other possible epistemologies in the society–nature relationship.