A (TOXI)CIDADE DE CUBATÃO: HISTÓRIA AMBIENTAL, DESASTRES TECNOLÓGICOS E A CONSTRUÇÃO DO IMAGINÁRIO AMBIENTAL DA CIDADE TÓXICA NA DÉCADA DE 1980

Abstract

In this dissertation in history seek to explore the construction of journalistic discourse as producers of environmental apocalyptic imagery of the city of Cubatão, São Paulo, in the 1980s, especially in the field of newspaper The Tribune. The speeches contained in the materials of the Tribune - as well as newspapers and magazines from around the world - contributed to the construction and permanence of the idea of Cubatão as a (methoxy) city. In the 1970s, during the military dictatorship, Cubatão was a key part of the Brazilian economy, responsible alone for 4% of national GDP. The city of Cubatão holds the first and one of the most important Brazilian petrochemical complexes, and became internationally known in the 1980s due to various environmental problems that have continued to come out. These, which were generated as a result of action of decades of basic industries - oil, steel and fertilizer - each burning tons of toxic waste from its chimneys daily contaminated fauna, flora, and the local population, composed mostly by workers these same industries. In this research, I argue that, even with the environmental policies of the industrial pollution control in the 1980s and with a new identity forged from the ecological discourse in the early 1990s - this speech that breaks with the idea of introducing the gray city green city - Cubatão remains in the environmental imagination as the toxic city to the present day. An important point discussed in the work is the relationship between the development policies - supported by scientific discourses, such as the economy - with all kinds of environmental disasters that occurred in Cubatão. I situate Cubatão in the theory of risk society Ulrich Beck (1986), and I believe that every great technological enterprise is highly thinking and calculated, since its viability to its possible risks. Thus, critical that while industrial centers are major technological developments designed by technocrats to promote economic development from development projects, industrial technicians not calculated or not developed policies for the prevention of possible incidents that came to cause disaster all kinds, such as acid rain, floods, explosions, fires, contamination of rivers, mangroves, animals and plants, in addition to anencephaly and hundreds of illnesses and deaths caused by direct human and indirectly by the action of industries.