Dimas Floriani

• PhD in Sociology UCL-Belgium
• Professor (Full) at Federal University of Paraná

Famous 19th century German philosopher used to say that humanity does not pose problems that it cannot solve. We could invert this famous formula, full of Enlightenment optimism, in which reason and technique would establish themselves as sovereign for the ways of humanity: that the resolution of problems can come from limited solutions or answers that have nothing to do with the questions asked. Thus, this Enlightenment creed began to sink, refuted by the economic crises, wars, pandemics and the outbreak of irrationalities that have since coexisted with that myth of growing and linear progress.

As it has been difficult to believe in a totally rational human being, another apparently neutral and pragmatic formula was created, that of instrumental rationality, by which everyone would benefit from the growth of wealth, sumptuous consumption, in which the car, the shopping mall, the tourism internationally, sports championships would be the new temples along with the old and new houses of faith, incubators of prosperity for the poor. Until then, diseases were treated in isolation, even though most of them stemmed from unrestrained lifestyles and consumption, inflated by globalized capitalism (the runaway world to use an expression of one of the theorists of globalization).

The global crises and changes of the last decades are not only of an economic, social and political order, but fundamentally a consequence of forgetting nature, that is, the socio-environmental dimension, through which and through which the limits of the productivist model are expressed (producing for producing , consume for consumption, for the benefit of a few and to the detriment of immense populations marginalized by the process of concentration of planetary income), in which the uses of nature occur through its transformation as a commodity, without limits.

As a consequence and as an appeal in favor of this (i) instrumental rationality, the defense of forests, rivers, forests, in short, biodiversity by traditional populations and native peoples are interpreted and accused of obstacles to progress, economic growth and seen as backward, poor and that must be assimilated simply in urban centers, when not simply executed.

Now, this spiral is accompanied by a belief system on the part of governments and economic, political elites, a part of the scientific and religious community, national and international, who propose the market as the only one capable of balancing spending, that employment of people derives from its own merits and that each one who is able to do this is successfully established in society. State spending and its public policies are the enemy of this long-dreamed fiscal stability and the sanitation of society and that corruption would be the cause of all the problems presented by current societies, including the Brazilian one. Ideologies move through simplifications, always against someone or something, scapegoats for the past and the present.

Today, some of the effects of this globalized crisis are expressed in risks to the health and reproduction of the living conditions of the human species, as is the case of the virus (Covid19) that is spreading rapidly across all the nations of the globe, reaching the stage already pandemic.

No longer are conflicts exclusively of a political order, dictated by the social classes that are striving to impose models of different societies. Nature entered the scene, as an expression of those same conflicts, an element never thought of by Machiavelli or Marx, but only by the production of literary fiction narratives, by some renowned authors such as Inácio Loyola Brandão (You will not see any country), José Saramago ( Essay on blindness), Albert Camus (The Plague), the 1980s television series (Planet of the Apes), among countless productions of the genre.

This pandemic, synthesis of these structural and structuring factors of current societies on a global scale, poses questions of difficult resolution, in the short and medium term, for each and every one that is still alive on this Planet, if we do not know properly elaborate the questions in this regard.

In turn, crises open opportunities to rethink the agenda of the agendas around which the models of social organization, the dominant economic and political systems are structured, and thus open up a new light to rethink this agenda and see in which To the extent that opening may provide opportunities for criticism, self-criticism and new solutions.

Development models, based on increased economic growth, have laid the foundations for the functioning structures of Western economies since the 1950s, based on technological modernization and the commodification of nature, by increasing international trade, based on the strengthening of the role National States.

From the 1980s, these models went into crisis and what we saw was a weakening of national political and economic sovereignties, in the name of another ideology, neoliberalism, which chose the market as the central altar for the functioning of societies, with serious consequences of exclusion for large sectors of human populations expropriated or neglected by this new policy.

Social actors marginalized by this immense wave of world exclusion were gradually generating political responses, supported by a critical reading of this process of exclusion and in the name of defending their rights to the territory, income, productive activities, social inclusion and rights political organization, implementing new practices and new rhetoric capable of generating resistance strategies and other alternatives for society.

In the midst of this resistance reaction, new conceptions of social organization are elaborated, on a still molecular basis, of small-scale local development, in order to generate alternatives to development and not continue on the development path. Today, there is talk of post-development outings, which include new cooperative associations of family and agroecological producers in the countryside, artisanal fishermen's organizations, management of territories by indigenous peoples, revitalization of ancestral practices and knowledge aimed at management and uses of nature, such as medicinal herbs, healthy eating habits, necessary for preventive health measures.

These strategies are community-based, involving the various local agents, in a dialogue of knowledge and practices, but basically community agents and local public agents, associated with university extension projects that are strategically associated with a new dialogue of knowledge between scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge rooted.

Perhaps alternatives will arise, from these new forms of sociability, as there are already countless, in fact, even on a micro scale, but which could also be increased in marginalized urban spaces, with educational policies that create more aggregating and solidary forms among the neighbors, since the planting of vegetable gardens, herbs and community orchards, aiming to increase another complementary social or solidarity economy, different from the consumption circuit of the large supermarkets that offer food for those with income. In the case of Brazil, we have around 40 million people in the informal sector, a pleonasm to designate the immense mass of underemployed and 13 million formal unemployed.

Universities are called to engage in this process, through various extension projects, in frank and horizontal dialogue with the knowledge and social practices of communities that can and should interact with different actors, including public agents and social organizations, aligned with these local and community development strategies, in order to face the current crucial challenges, arising from the model itself that thought that its proposal was universal and that included everyone as beneficiaries of progress. What was forgotten was to bear in mind that the harm of this model was also distributed to a large portion of the world population, before it even enjoyed the benefits.