Entangled collectives: riverine people, landscapes, and emerged infrastructures on a climate change background

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to discuss the associations elaborated by riverine interlocutors between infrastructures and the landscape in which they occur, within the context of climate change in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Here, we debate the relational character of infrastructures, and how they act as important markers of river seasonality, landscape, people’s existence, and practices from the perspective of the accessed riverine people. This paper’s discussion is supported by qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and field notes from two riverine communities in the Amazonas state: Tumbira and Lago do Catalão. Inspired by authors who dialogue with Social Studies of Science and Technology and discuss infrastructures, their effects, their relational and ontological character, we seek to identify entanglements of landscape and infrastructure, and their implications in the practices and ways of living of riverine Amazonian people. Elements such as gas pipelines, power transmission lines, hydroelectric plants, cargo ships, and highways emerge, affect, and are affected in these entangled landscapes in the eyes of the riverine people. They merge with other entanglements such as the rivers and creeks that perform the riverine landscape and life. Thus, they induce reflections on such relationships and the affectations permeated by fears, wishes, and (dis)trust of their operation.

RESUMO

Este artigo busca discutir as associações elaboradas pelos interlocutores ribeirinhos entre paisagem e infraestruturas no contexto das mudanças climáticas no estado do Amazonas. Debatemos o caráter relacional das infraestruturas, mas também como elas atuam como marcadoras da sazonalidade do rio, paisagem, práticas e existências sob os olhos dos ribeirinhos acessados. A discussão é apoiada em dados qualitativos oriundos de entrevistas semiestruturadas e notas de campo realizadas em duas comunidades ribeirinhas do estado do Amazonas: Tumbira e Lago do Catalão. Inspiradas por autoras que dialogam com os Estudos Sociais em Ciência e Tecnologia e discutem infraestruturas, seus efeitos, e seu caráter relacional e ontológico, buscamos identificar os emaranhados de infraestruturas e paisagem, e suas implicações nas práticas e modos de existir de ribeirinhos e ribeirinhas amazônidas. Elementos como gasodutos, linhões de transmissão de energia, navios cargueiros, hidrelétricas, e rodovias emergem, afetam e são afetados nesses emaranhados. Mesclam-se ainda a outros emaranhados: dos rios e igarapés que performam a paisagem e a vida ribeirinha. Assim, provocam reflexões sobre as afetações permeadas por medos, desejos e (des)confiança no funcionamento de tais infraestruturas.

RESUMEN

Este artículo busca discutir las asociaciones trazadas por interlocutores ribereños entre paisaje e infraestructura en el contexto del cambio climático en el estado de Amazonas. Debatimos el carácter relacional de las infraestructuras, pero también cómo actúan como marcadores de la estacionalidad del río, del paisaje, de las prácticas y de las existencias ante la mirada de los ribereños a los que se accede. La discusión se sustenta en datos cualitativos provenientes de entrevistas semiestructuradas y notas de campo realizadas en dos comunidades ribereñas del estado de Amazonas: Tumbira y Lago do Catalão. Inspirándonos en autores que dialogan con los Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología y que discuten las infraestructuras, sus efectos y su carácter relacional y ontológico, buscamos identificar los entrelazamientos de las infraestructuras y el paisaje, y sus implicaciones para las prácticas y formas de existir de las ribereñas y los ribereños amazónicos. Elementos como gasoductos, líneas de transmisión eléctrica, buques de carga, hidroeléctricas y carreteras emergen, afectan y son afectados en estos entrelazamientos. También se fusionan con otros entrelazamientos: los ríos y arroyos que configuran el paisaje y la vida ribereña. Provocan así reflexiones sobre los afectos permeados por miedos, deseos y (des)confianza en el funcionamiento de tales infraestructuras.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazilian Amazon
• riverine people
• infrastructures
• landscapes
• climate change

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Amazônia brasileira
• ribeirinhos
• infraestruturas
• paisagens
• mudança climática

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Amazonía brasileña
• ribereños; infraestructuras; paisajes; cambio climático

1. Introduction

Discussed under different approaches (Fearnside 2001; Hetherington 2019; Larkin 2013; Miguel 2020; Miguel et al. 2019; Star 1999; Tsing 2019, 2021), infrastructures can be understood as big development projects, such as roads construction, hydroelectric plants, and their power transmission lines, or even as underground or underwater structures invisible to human eyes, such as gas pipelines, communication networks, or mineral exploration galleries.¹

However, other than concrete, pipes, and wires, the term infrastructure also comprises more abstract entities, such as protocols, policies, memories, rules, and patterns (Bowker et al. 2010). That is, it evokes a social organization which is not only human but also logistical, scientific, informational, and communicational. It is within the field of the material, but also of the relational or symbolic.

As will be approached throughout this article, we will focus on the infrastructure of major projects that emerge within the context of research on climate change. We discuss the relational and often ambivalent character of infrastructures, and how they act as important markers, be that of river seasonality, landscape, or people’s existence and practices. This also offers us clues on the potent intersection between infrastructure, landscape, and the environmental issue in general, which may foster further insights for research.

The field work and semi-structured interviews that were used in this paper were derived from another research project carried out in five riverine communities in the state of Amazonas, designed to understand the adaptative practices of the riverine people in facing climate change. Such research did not deal with infrastructures, and this was not planned as a central element for discussion. Nevertheless, infrastructures emerged as powerful forces during interviews in two of those communities, Tumbira in Novo Airão, and Lago do Catalão in Iranduba. In this paper, we focus on the emergence of infrastructures in an attempt to bring light to the relationships that riverine people perceive among weather, infrastructure, and landscape.

Climate change has gained more and more room among Social Sciences debates, especially by tensioning the distinction between the natural and the social, bringing a wide range of new contributions (Fleury, Miguel and Taddei 2019; Menin and Radaelli 2023). When we look at infrastructures from an STS point of view, we gain possibilities to broaden our understanding. We discuss, based on the reports, the way in which “trivial” infrastructures incur in “dangerous non projected effects,” operated by “imperial and industrial infrastructures.” But also, we discuss infrastructures as the wish for “development” denoting an ambivalence between it and the fears and uncertainties surrounding the scalability of industrial plants and the replicability of models (Tsing 2015, 2019).

Indeed, the global and local dynamics present themselves merged and demonstrate challenges to their interpretations. As we will discuss, even though big projects are not the theme of our research, this seems to be an inescapable matter when dialogue is established about environmental effects and affectations in relation to disturbances.

2. Infrastructures

Research regarding infrastructures has raised questions and enhanced approaches on the subject, in particular within the Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS). Many ways of approaching infrastructures as a starting point for analysis complexify the perspectives on their social effects, which range from understanding knowledge production, social organization, and power relations (Miguel 2020) to understanding their technopolitical history and ability to provoke assemblages.

In the Social Sciences, the concept of infrastructure is approached in several texts since the foundation of the discipline, especially when discussing ways of living in modernity. However, as Hetherington (2019) argues, many studies have been seeking to redefine such term, bringing new objects to the center of the debate. Hetherington (2019) highlights how “environment and infrastructure share a great deal of conceptual territory, and the Anthropocene disturbs the distinction between them.” Environment precedes infrastructure, since it determines which technical procedures are necessary to its construction. But, at the same time, the environment itself is the infrastructure of infrastructure (Hetherington 2019). Thus, large or global infrastructures complexify the debate about such relations. According to this logic, “we would have to say that carbon is the infrastructure of the infrastructure of carbon” (Hetherington 2019).

The definition of infrastructure surpasses the existence of new technical systems, but at the same time, as Miguel (2020) indicates, it is between the concrete and the abstract, or even between visible and invisible. Gas pipelines with over six hundred kilometers long, responsible for transporting natural gas through the Amazonas state, for example, compose the dynamics of the visible and the invisible within infrastructures. In this case, they are transparent in their subterranean extension, but symbolically visible to the respondents when they reflect upon their fears when considering possible flaws – flaws that could be catastrophic, going way beyond a simple interruption in supply.

Transparency and visibility conditioned by collapse are two of the sociotechnical and organizational properties that researchers Susan Star (1999) and Star and Ruhleder (1996) redefined in their research. For them, the key point of infrastructures, which permeates these suggested properties, is that they are constituted of a fundamentally relational concept, only becoming real infrastructure in relation to the practices they organize. The relational character becomes evident in the practical examples they bring: for someone in a wheelchair, stairs and door stops to access a building don’t mean a continuity in access, but rather a huge barrier. And starting there, they argue that what can be an infrastructure for some is a difficulty for others. In that sense, “analytically, infrastructure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use” (Star and Ruhleder 1996, 113).

As highlighted by Larkin (2013), goods, people, and ideas circulate in infrastructures. In physical form, they can shape the speed, networks, temporalities, and possible vulnerabilities in which these exchanges are established. Larkin (2013) reminds us of the ways in which infrastructures can inform us about government practices and social issues. He also highlights how this works simultaneously, causing multiple effects, making it necessary to select which levels we wish to analyze.

According to Jensen and Morita (2015), infrastructures can be understood as “ontological experiments,” in the sense that they are locations where different agents meet, become entangled, become involved, eventually come into conflict, friction and, from this meeting, produce new worlds. In this line, they end up configuring a possible way to trace transformations and allow reflections that move the human away from the centrality (non-human centered) of the analysis.

As Tsing (2019) states, questioning the industrial and imperial programs that modified the land, water, and atmosphere is part of the “time of environmental terrors” in which we are inserted. The geopolitical, territorial, and development dynamics in the Amazon become an important locus of analysis when we discuss infrastructures. Infrastructures are places where humans and other than humans, as well as different ecologies, meet and produce new configurations.

As described by Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt (2019), our current geological era, the Anthropocene,² produces patches and is “a differentiated composition of species and ecological conditions; it is part of a heterogeneous ‘landscape’.” According to the authors, differentiated ecological patches are produced, such as large industrial complexes or plantations. Infrastructure, for Tsing (2021), refers to projects that can range from plantations to factories and international transactions, altering land, water, and atmosphere. They are, therefore, also understood as “governance projects” or “material projects of landscape transformation.” For the author, the study of this moment in humanity “must start with the infrastructures and the beings remade by these infrastructures.” It is therefore interesting to pay attention to such patches, since each of them can be the object of analysis of issues such as climate justice and inequalities. Which populations or territories are immersed in these patches? In which ways they affect and are affected? In which ways do patches configure themselves into infrastructures?

Amazonian roads and large vessels, in addition to technical objects, also inform us about levels of fantasy and desire, as highlighted by Larkin (2013) in relation to infrastructures. About desires and fantasies that relate to an appeal for development, Camana and Almeida (2019) discuss the production of the “emptiness” discourse present in an international cooperation project in Mozambique. Similarly, the narrative of the “empty” or “forgotten” about the Amazonian states still persists, which eventually causes this ambiguity reflected in the desire for development.

The narrative about the Amazon in relation to the expansion of large infrastructures – as is the case of the Transamazônica,³ or more recently the construction of hydroelectric plants such as Belo Monte – has a strong relationship with the construction of an imagery of “emptiness.” This, in turn, is historically rooted in the reports of traveling naturalists and in the violent onslaughts of the colonizing project in the Amazon, perpetrated by the Iberian metropolis and missionaries who founded the image of “savage people of the jungle” (Radaelli 2020; Schweickardt 2012; Silva 2004). Such imagery is still circulating in new colonialism, as a spiral that renews and updates itself disguised as developmentalism: numerous colonization projects in Amazonian regions, such as the Tucumã Project, in the state of Pará (Salles 2022), or even the pejorative adjectives of the Amazon as “green hell”⁴ or “nobody’s land” in campaigns to publicize the infrastructure works operated by civil–military governments between 1970 and 1980 in Brazil.⁵

Since then, developmental ideals populate the initiatives of large projects for the Amazon in an imposing and colonialist way, governed by a conflicting “modernizing” homogenization (Castro 2012; Castro and Hébette 1989). And it is conflicting precisely because, on the one hand, it is imposed, and on the other, it is guided by this imagery that disregards the specificities and existences of this place, which is anything other than “empty.” Authors Wilson and Bayón (2017) point out that since the colonization project, “the Amazon has been framed in the capitalist imaginarium as a land of superabundant natural wealth.” One of the contemporary effects caused by this, linked to a developmental boom euphoria that inspires “the feverish construction of iconic spatial utopias,” is the white elephants left when projects are suspended due to the retreat of the “flood of rents.” The authors’ arguments bring up cases of infrastructure in Venezuela, Nigeria, and the Ecuadorian Amazon itself, where the research takes place.

In contrast to the historical imagery of emptiness, Neves (2022) and his studies on the new Amazonian archeology have demonstrated how the Amazon was densely occupied in its history. The recent discoveries of several preserved archaeological sites reinforce the diversity of humans and other than humans in the so-called “terra pretas” (“black earth”), which are extremely fertile, rich in organic matter, and living anthropized soils. These places are located in patches of territories of past occupation and are widely distributed throughout the Amazon biome. One of the findings associated with the black earth was the intense relationship between indigenous people and the forest: trees such as the Brazilian nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa) don’t follow random dissemination patterns, but rather their distribution is a product of human action. The importance of these studies of Amazonian archeology is represented, for example, in the demand for archeological and anthropological studies for the environmental licensing of any infrastructure work in the Brazilian Amazon region. In this sense, the forest is a proper infrastructure which connects itself with many other layers, present or past, of other infrastructures.

To be aware of infrastructures and their feralness, therefore, informs us of the patches in the Anthropocene (Tsing 2021). However, infrastructures are not only pieces of patches, but they develop among political powers. As presented in the Feral Atlas by Tsing, there are four programs of infrastructural development: invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Thus, for Tsing “the infrastructures show us the ways in which the Anthropocene patches are created, that is, the landscape structure.”

As informed by Tsing (2021), the scale of infrastructures that are the theme of this article emerged from the problems associated with landscape structure. Therefore, instead of seeking to break from “progress” trajectories that ignore what happens around an infrastructure, for example, we choose to look around and pay attention to every aspect, not only to the privileged trajectory about progress. Thus, infrastructures present themselves as ontological places of experimentation (Jensen and Morita 2015), making it interesting also to observe their cracks and possible contradictions. Starting from the cracks, or refuges, in Tsing’s (2019) terms, we can also broaden our understanding of worlds. Infrastructures that cause patches on the Anthropocene, therefore, cannot be understood from a duality between positive and negative. They are involved in multiple layers of complexity and landscape, as we intend to show in this article.

3. Methodology

The empirical evidence discussed here originally comes from a preliminary field research that took place in March 2020. A few days later, Brazil would declare the coronavirus pandemic. Confirmation of the first case of Covid-19 in Manaus took place on the last day of our field work. Months later we would see, not without anguish, Manaus being transformed into one of the biggest epicenters of the virus in Brazil. Thus, based on this pandemic scenario and consequent sanitary restrictions (lockdown), what was initially a preview ended up becoming the original field research. We therefore worked with what was possible while we were in lockdown, knowing that fieldwork would not be likely again until we reached the minimum health security guaranteed through broad vaccination – which only started in January 2021.

The goal of the field research was to investigate the effects of climate change on the practices of riverine communities, especially in relation to changes in the dynamics of rivers. Imbued with the theoretical-methodological framework of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) we were tracing paths and “following the actors” (Latour, 2012), which allowed us to access the communities highlighted here. The methodology was permeated by ethnographic inspiration using tools such as field notes, photographic records, and semi-structured interviews.

We would start communicating with the actors by seeking to comprehend their understanding regarding the term “climate change.” Then, there were questions about their work routines in agriculture and/or fishing, how they dealt with extreme periods of drought and record floods, and what practices resulted from that. What separates the content of that initial research from the data we bring here is precisely the emergence of infrastructures: as our interview script did not cover questions or provocations regarding this theme, they emerged during the dialogues with the riverine people as important elements in the association between climate change and the dynamics of rivers and landscapes, or the changes they experienced.

The field trip received support from the AmazonFACE⁶ Program; the authors are part of the social component of the program. It's overall objective is to understand how climate change will affect the Amazon rainforest, the biodiversity it harbors, and the ecosystem services it provides to humanity. In this last aspect, it seeks to leave a legacy of research that favors the proposition of public policies to mitigate projected environmental effects – the focus of the Program’s social component. In the case of our research, the support was given as a way to broaden the project’s understanding of what climate change is for riverine communities.

The Tumbira community is located on the banks of the small river that names the community and is one of the tributaries of the Rio Negro. It comprises 32 families and is part of the Rio Negro Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS), a conservation unit created in 2008 and managed by the state of Amazonas. The Catalão community is located at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers, the famous “meeting of the waters,” made up of 100 houseboats (about 115 families) and belongs to the municipality of Iranduba. Figure 1 seeks to inform the reader about the locations.

Figure 1. Location of communities accessed and routes taken. Source: elaborated by Aline Radaelli using Google My Maps.

Access to the Tumbira community, about 63 kilometers from Manaus, was via a ride on the speedboat belonging to the Fundação Amazônia Sustentável, which is a partner of the State Secretariat for the Environment of Amazonas (SEMA) in managing the conservation unit. The journey (yellow line on the map) took about 90 min from Davi’s marina in Manaus. We learned two days before, through a fellow collaborator of the Foundation, that the trip would take place in the morning and we would return to Manaus in the beginning of the evening, so we requested the support of a ride. On the part of the Foundation’s technicians, the purpose of the trip was to perform electrical maintenance on the solar panels that generate energy for the community. On our part, the intention was to access community members who could talk to us about the effects of climate change on the practical life of communities.

Two days after our trip to the Tumbira community, we started to organize the access to the Catalão community. The recommendation was made by a fellow researcher who works with tourism within the community. Approximately three kilometers from one of the ports of Manaus (CEASA port), access was via a speedboat and the trip took around ten minutes (purple line on the map). The interlocutions that we selected for discussion in this work are from two riverine people: Mrs. V.,⁷ a woman who lives in the Tumbira community, and Mr. J., a man who lives in the floating community Lago do Catalão. Below are some elements of the personal history of both of them.

Mrs. V. is a state teacher at the community school. She also works with scientific and community tourism, welcoming visitors to her house, which was partly renovated to turn it into a hostel. Her family has been living on the Tumbira riverside for over 50 years, when her father, a shipbuilder, arrived in the region with the aim of setting up his shipyard. Two of her brothers who live in the community also work in tourism: a brother’s restaurant and inn, and a sister’s handicraft and biojewelry shop.

Mr. J. is a boat foreman with a maritime license and was the pilot of our vessel. He proudly tells us that he currently works full-time, in shifts, at a company in the industrial district of Manaus that provides collection, river, and road transport services for the correct final destination of solid and liquid oil waste. In between shifts, he operates his speedboat at the CEASA port tourism cooperative called Solinegro – Cooperativa de Transporte de Turismo Ambiental com Base Comunitária da Amazônia (Environmental Tourism Transport Cooperative with the Base Community of the Amazon).

Acting in the tourism chain as an alternative job is a point of similarity between the two interlocutors and also their communities. The proximity to Manaus makes many surrounding communities, such as Tumbira and Catalão, follow this path to guarantee work and extra income through the provision of touristic services. In this sense, the riverine landscape, made up of multiple entities – rivers, streams, forest, beaches – and the riverine way of existing gain other highlights from this way of presenting themselves to the world: the trivial blends in with the exceptional. This ambivalence shows the contours of belonging to these riverine people who, being able to move, choose to remain.

In this context, the riverine way of existing becomes elementary for the discussion about which are the effects of climate change, as it informs us about the intensity and influence of these changes in riverine practices and existence. Reducing working hours under the sun in agriculture informs not only about the intensity of the temperature change experienced over time (years),⁸ but also, and consequently, about the reduction in the amount of food harvested during the day. Starting to have difficulty predicting the dynamics of the river, the winds or the rain indicates that something “around the climate has changed,” but it also means fears regarding the uncertainties of navigation: in order not to catch a storm and take risks on the river, “you had to know the weather […] and it was right. Not anymore” (Mr. J.).

In line with Ingold and Kurttila (2018), we believe that talking about the climate and listening to the experiences of riverine dwellers regarding the weather give access to a past memory, experienced and compared, but which is also performed in the present. In the midst of this, infrastructures and the observation of modified landscapes emerge, which produce effects on what things were, are, and may become.

4. Tangled landscapes and infrastructures

In order to discuss the entanglements in which infrastructures emerge, this section will be composed of field reports and excerpts from interviews with riverine interlocutors. Along them, infrastructures emerged in relation to an event related to the river, as this was our gateway to accessing the theme of climate change.

The reports show the changes in the margins, main bed, and dynamics of the rivers that are related to two aspects that sometimes merge: at times with the extension of the dry or flood seasons, at times with the existence or impediment of large works or infrastructures of “development.” And so, some affectations begin to take shape for humans and other-than-humans. We consider this emergence of a “tangle of disturbance” when looking at the overlapping effects it causes: an event that produces other landscapes and multiple transformations, which can be filled with affectations by producing fears, lack of knowledge, and impotence.

As an event that alters and produces other landscapes, we bring an excerpt from our dialogue with Mrs. V., from the Tumbira community. In the passage, she shows that the periods of drought on the creek gained greater proportions after the construction of a state highway that crosses upstream of her community: the AM-352 (green dot on the map in Figure 1) that connects Manaus to the municipality of Novo Airão. She reports that the construction was responsible for alterations in the course of the stream that were sufficient to cause silting up along its length and that, for this reason, the Tumbira began to dry out more than it is known, giving rise to islands of sandbanks that were not seen before and causing logistical difficulties for residents who use the stream to travel.

“This right here, from here to there [points toward the source of the creek], when the river really dries up, we walk on land. And then the river, you see, it’s amazing! If you take a picture from above, it looks like those islands that we see, a frame of islands, and it’s the bottom of the river. And then, in past years, this did not happen. Let’s say, up to 40 years ago, 30 years ago, this did not happen. Now, there is a factor why this happens: since the years 1993–1994, when they built the road that connects Novo Airão to Manacapuru-Manaus, then it passes here at the source of this stream, right, cuts the Tumbira at the end, crosses the source there, it goes on. So the road passes there, this work on the road, there was the silting up of the river, so this land [sand] comes from there and brings it to where the water has the strength to bring it, right […]. What I say is, this development happens, but also along with it come the consequences, right?” (Ms. V. – field data, 2020)

The highway, then, becomes a marker of what it was before and what it becomes after in terms of river flows and transits. But above all a marker of the intensification of the drought as, with each period of ebb of the river, one begins to deal with a different landscape – and admire the “frame of islands” that is the bottom of the emerged river. This ambiguity between dealing with and admiring is even evident when Mrs. V. associates the construction of the highway with an ideal of development (imposed) which, however, carries such “consequences.”

As Camana and Blanco (2020) suggest, an STS approach makes it possible to make development studies more complex. The authors argue that many of the descriptions made in development studies commonly place actors as people who are “affected.” However, what the authors identify and propose based on their research is that “subjects are ‘affected’ in different ways, articulating refusals and development wills in different ways.” Camana and Blanco (2020) contribute to our analysis as they reflect on the ambiguity of the subjects, which is also expressed in the dimension of desire.

Infrastructures also appear as liable to being affected by the landscape and, for that reason, “have never left the paper”: for the interlocutor Mr. J., the dynamics and behavior of the Solimões River – essentially, its agency – is capable of preventing construction projects of a bridge that would connect Manaus (capital of the state of Amazonas) to the municipality of Careiro da Várzea – which would provide asphalted continuity to the controversial BR-319, the highway that connects Manaus to Porto Velho (capital of the state of Rondônia) and, consequently, to the rest of the country by road.

That’s why they never built the bridge from Manaus to Careiro da Várzea. Because it won’t work, you can’t do it in the Solimões. There are times when it can fill a pillar of sand, make a beach. Or it can dig too. There’s no way, there are times when it digs, there are times when it fills in that spot. This other end of the Catalão [community] formed an immense large beach in the middle of the river, and by the next year it already sank. Solimões itself dug up the beach, took it away, and today it is a canal, where the beach used to be. So you can see how the river puts it on and takes it off. (Mr J. – field data, 2020)

For Mr. J., a construction this size “won’t work” and may be compromised due to the changes that the periods of floods and droughts carry and promote in the bed and on the banks of the river. Mr. J., who has been working as a vessel pilot for over twenty years and who has already navigated several Amazonian rivers, sees that the main alteration of the Solimões River is its widening due to landslides on the banks, which even affect the orientation of the main channel and make it one of the most dangerous rivers to navigate.

Throughout our conversation with Mr. J., which lasted half a day, permeated by breaks for breakfast and lunch offered by his family, he brought up other issues that were a means of making infrastructures emerge: the Luz para Todos Program (sourcing electricity to all communities) and the natural gas pipeline network by Petrobras that extends from the municipality of Coari to Manaus to essentially supply the industrial center of Manaus and feed seven thermoelectric plants in the metropolitan region of the capital.

One of the projects that was very worthwhile here, especially in Amazonas, and which worked out was that project by [President] Lula, it was Luz para Todos. Man, this Luz para Todos was such a boom in the lives of riverine people, for people from the countryside. And you can look to the other side [of the river] there, there is a pole. Pole crosses there. So, that was really good. On this edge, you wouldn’t think there is energy, but there is! In this Amazon. Then the caboquinho now has his little television, his little air conditioner. It’s not just a thatched house anymore. It may be small, but it has air conditioning. So then it modernized. (Mr. J. – field data, 2020)

The Luz para Todos Program complies with Law No. 10.438/2022, which establishes that the universalization of public electricity services must be carried out at no cost to the applicant. It was instituted by Decree N° 4.873/2003 under the name National Program for Universalization of Access and Use of Electric Energy – Luz para Todos (Light for All), having been changed over its years of extension by another series of decrees. It is a federal public policy coordinated by the former Ministry of Mines and Energy and operated with Centrais Elétricas Brasileiras S.A.– Eletrobras and its subsidiaries (Freitas and Silveira 2015), which had groups of rural families without access to electricity as a priority.

In Amazonas, rural areas that received rural electrification were interconnected to the national supply network through the so-called “Tucuruí line,” an electrical transmission network from the Tucuruí Hydroelectric Power Plant (UHE), installed on the Tocantins River, in the city of Tucuruí in the state of Pará. The line works covered the region of the lower and middle Amazon River, including some tributary rivers such as the Trombetas and the Uatumã, to interconnect Macapá (capital of the state of Amapá) and Manaus in the national network (Figure 2). This meant that, in addition to rural areas, riverine communities and protected areas had constant access to electricity, and small municipalities in the region no longer had diesel and coal-powered plants as their main source of supply.

Figure 2. Map of the transmission network of the Tucuruí HPP. Source: Doile and Nascimento (2010).

One of the controversies of this great work of infrastructure for the transmission of energy from a hydroelectric plant⁹ lies in the fact that it crosses several traditional territories, indigenous lands, and quilombolas for example, in a way that is not adequate to the consultation protocols guaranteed since 2004 in Brazil. The most recent issue surrounding Tucuruí involves the construction stage of the fourth batch of transmission lines, which would be installed between Manaus and Boa Vista (capital of the state of Roraima) in order to interconnect this state – currently supplied by diesel thermoelectric plants – to the national electricity system.

From it, other questions arise regarding the controversy: the initial project suggests the passage of the line crossing Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Land for 122 kilometers (Figure 3). Planned since 2011, the construction has been suspended so far due to the absence of consultation processes with indigenous peoples and proposals for compensatory measures.

Figure 3. Stage of the transmission line proposed to interconnect Roraima to the national electrical system, highlighting (dark gray) the Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Land. Source: Adapted from G1 infographic art, available at http://glo.bo/44PcRd9.

These examples of great enterprises reveal what Camana and Blanco (2020) or even Larkin (2013) talk about on desire and how it relates to the construction of infrastructure. In the interviewee’s speech there is a controversial understanding in relation to the projects. Returning to Star’s discussion (1999) and the question of the visibility of these large enterprises, we understand that these highlighted infrastructures are not in the background, since the interviewees are entangled in them.

So far, we have brought up infrastructures that emerged in the interlocutions from the fact that they are visible, and so are their effects. A road, a line, a hydroelectric plant are visible infrastructures, even if they are relatively distant from their homes. But we would also like to point out the emergence of invisible infrastructures, either because they are buried – such as pipelines or an underground mine for mineral exploration, for example – or even carrying a subjective invisibility marked by a trivial aspect of the existence of certain infrastructures. Or even because of the infrastructure of foreign commerce flows that becomes visible through the existence of other elements, as is the case of cargo ships that travel along the entire Amazon River carrying the flow of commodities (soy from the central-west region of Brazil essentially) and the importation of industrial components.

What could seem a bit common or trivial for some, to see a vessel going down the river toward the ocean to follow export routes, is not for those who live on the riverbank and watch a huge ship pass by the door of their house, producing “undesigned dangerous effects” operated by “industrial and imperial infrastructures” (Tsing 2019): the reports are permeated by fear and imminent attention as soon as they see the ships. And right after that, they feel them by the force of the banzeiro (river waves) that destabilizes their homes.

Trust and distrust also appear in relation to the pipeline network of the Petrobrás gas pipeline installed between Coari, municipality on the Solimões river, and Manaus to supply, mainly, the industrial center of Manaus and thermoelectric plants in some municipalities not connected to the national system. While Mrs. V. reports having already imagined the rupture or collapse of this system, comparing it to the explosion of a gas cylinder, Mr. J. considers that it was a gain since it replaced the thermoelectric plants that used a type of shale and caused air and noise pollution.

5. Final remarks

From the provocations that we experienced in our field research on climate change and riverine communities, carried out in March 2020, we seek to reflect upon infrastructures that emerge from dialogue on climate change and alterations of the rivers’ dynamics. When we look at infrastructures from a Social Studies of Science and Technology point of view, we understand that the possibilities add up to broaden our understanding.

The article highlighted dialogues established with Mrs. V. from the Tumbira community and Mr. J. from the Catalão community, both located in municipalities neighboring Manaus – Novo Airão and Iranduba, respectively, in Amazonas. Through these dialogues, we identified that the emergence of infrastructures was an ambivalent event, promoting trust and distrust. While an interlocutor praises the Luz para Todos Program, which promoted the connection of rural areas in this region of the lower Amazon to the national electrical system through the “Tucuruí line” and allowed the riverine people to have access to durable goods such as digital television and air-conditioning, there are distrusts and anxieties regarding the freighters that move along the Amazon River and cause strong banzeiros – a succession of waves caused by the displacement of a cargo ship.

The interlocutions highlighted here regarding the ambivalence between the effects of infrastructures and the desire for development refer us to a passage in which Miguel (2020) argues that it is fundamental “to reflect on how infrastructures are designed and planned and what they produce in terms of political effects.” According to the author, that allows exposing under which forms of authority these solidify, debating on who will be excluded – or finally included – in the functionalities foreseen from the installation and operation of these infrastructures, or even understanding which rights will be affected, for more or for less, considering the existence of these structures. This becomes even more elementary when we see discussions about large development projects for the Amazon made generically, and some “white elephants” left under the guidance of the imagery of “empty spaces.”

What is defined as infrastructure goes through the existence of new technical systems and has a fundamentally relational character. However, as we have seen, it is also something that is between the concrete and the abstract, or even between the visible and the invisible. The gas pipelines over six hundred kilometers long, responsible for transporting natural gas throughout the state of Amazonas, for example, make up this dynamic of the visible and invisible within infrastructures. In this case, transparent in their underground extension, but symbolically visible to respondents when they reflect on their fears when considering possible flaws – flaws that could be catastrophic, going far beyond a simple interruption in supply.

Indeed, we also seek to point out the ways in which “trivial” or “ubiquitous” infrastructures, which for this reason often end up becoming invisible, incur in dangerous unplanned effects. We interpret as a form of care what Tsing (2020) suggests: paying attention again to everything around us, and not just to the privileged trajectories identified with progress. And we try to put into practice the attentive walk with active listening when following our actors.

What separates the motivating theme of our field trip from the data we brought to this article is precisely the emergence of infrastructures in the tangled collective: despite our interview script, they emerged during the dialogues with the riverine people as important elements in the association between climate change and the dynamics of rivers and landscapes. This denotes not only the multiple possibilities of entering the theme of climate change but also how changes are apprehended by riverine people who experience climate from the experimentation of weather.

The way in which riverine dwellers are able to find themselves in the middle of river islands in periods of drought, knowing exactly where there are boulders or sandbanks they need to divert from, or when they enter the forest to hunt, cultivate, look for wood or collect fruits and seeds, suggests they have the precision of a locating device or sonar. This happens either because they experience these landscapes on a daily basis, perceiving their changes in different periods and seasons, or because of access to a “settled” past memory, or even because of the combination of both factors. Climate change has produced effects, not only in relation to the difficulty of predicting phenomena, but also in subjective terms of apprehending space–time and memories.

Finally, the dialogues and exchanges proposed here, supported by research on the subject, show how a research agenda at the intersection between the environmental issue and infrastructure can promote important discussions about how we understand the environment and extreme weather events in their multitude of effects. In addition, they can encourage reflections on possible and necessary alliances to be made and remade, about caring for the multiple existences of humans and other-than-humans, and about possibilities for coping with climate change.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the riverine men and women who welcomed us into their communities. We also acknowledge funds from Brazil’s Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) scholarships and funding for field work (Grants CAPES-INPA/88881.154644/2017-01 and 23038.007722/2014-77), the Graduate Program in Sociology at UFRGS for supporting field research, the AmazonFACE Program, represented by Carlos Alberto Quesada (INPA) and David Lapola (Unicamp), and the technicians from the Fundação Amazônia Sustentável and the Amazonas State Secretariat for the Environment. We also thank the reviewers and editors who collaborated to refine the discussion of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aline Radaelli

Aline Radaelli is a PhD candidate in Sociology (UFRGS), she holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology (UFAM) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economic Sciences (ESALQ-USP). She is a member of TEMAS Group (Technology, Environment and Society) and of the AmazonFACE Program. Email: [email protected].

Júlia Menin

Júlia Menin is a PhD candidate in Sociology (UFRGS), she holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology (UFRGS) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Sciences (UFRGS). She is a member of TEMAS Group (Technology, Environment and Society) and of the AmazonFACE Program. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 A preview of this article was discussed in the theme session “Infrastructures and ecology in crisis: reflections from the present and future alliances,” of the VIII REACT – Reunião de Antropologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia (Meeting of Anthropology of Science and Technology), which was held online in November 2021. We thank the thematic seminar’s coordination and the fellow participants for the valuable exchanges.

2 Although Anna Tsing establishes this thought-provoking relationship between infrastructures and the idea of the Anthropocene, we point out that we will not dwell on it in depth at this time.

3 The Transamazônica highway (BR-230) is the longest federal highway in Brazil. Its construction in the 1970s, during the political period of the military dictatorship in Brazil, is surrounded by controversy. Its starting point is on the coast of the state of Paraíba, and after crossing six Brazilian states, it has its final point in the city of Lábrea, state of Amazonas. In all, there are 4997 kilometers of highway. Its original project envisaged a road twice as long, 8000 kilometers long, which would connect the Brazilian Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast of Peru and Ecuador.

4 Rf. Alberto Rangel, Inferno verde: cenas e cenários do Amazonas, 1908.

5 See images of advertising pieces and media coverage gathered in Ricardo Cardim’s research at https://bit.ly/3rErCB9 and recordings about the construction of the Transamazônica highway gathered by the National Museum at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZ0h9yJ26M (video saved, oddly enough, on a channel called “automotive news”).

6 The term FACE is an acronym for “Free Air CO2 Enrichment,” a technology used in the research which characterizes it as unprecedented in a tropical forest. The structure that shelters this technology was set up in order to expose primary portions of the Amazon rainforest to a concentration of carbon dioxide of 200 ppm (parts per million) above the current one. And then, to analyze the effects and the ways in which the ecosystem reacts to the increase in CO2 both above and below ground, where there is an important network of microorganisms that interact with the roots. Thus, we seek to understand the role of this greenhouse gas in the scenario of climate change.

7 We chose to preserve the identity of the interlocutors by referencing them only by the initials of their names.

8 On the different practices of observing climate and weather on the part of scientists and local populations, and how, for the latter, weather is closely associated with individual life histories and work tasks, see Ingold and Kurttila (2018).

9 We highlight the valuable critical contributions of researchers who question the “clean” character of hydroelectric energy sources (Fearnside 2001, 2011, 2015, 2019a, 2019b; Fleury and Almeida 2013; Zhouri 2012; Zhouri and Oliveira 2007), especially considering that they are infrastructures permeated by violation of human rights, territories, and high environmental impact. In addition, projection errors occur with relative recurrence regarding the scope of the flooding of the reservoir from the construction of the dams and even regarding the energy generation capacity, often becoming an underutilized infrastructure. The authors, however, preferred not to delve into such discussions in the present work.