Sustentabilidade ambiental local: o caso da comunidade pesqueira de Ponta Grossa - Icapuí - Ceará - Brasil

Abstract

The analysis that we will make on the sustainability will envisage to assess local environmental sustainability based upon social, cultural, ecological, environmental, territorial, economic and public criteria. Environmental sustainability in traditional fishing communities is of decisive importance to understand this issue which is present in the communities daily life. Ponta Grossa beach is a 200-inhabitant fishing nucleus in the far north of the Municipality of Icapui, Ceará State, 190 km away from Fortaleza, the state capital city. It has a half-moon-shaped inlet, bathed by a smooth sea, featuring its rocky formation in low tide. It has plenty of trees and its residential nucleus has no more than 60 houses within a large area of coco-nut trees, hiding the charm of a traditionally religious community whose people bring on their face the deep marks of their lives as fishermen mixed with the joy of living them. Ponta Grossa is famous for almost having been the birth of the discovery of Brazil, since, according to historians, on February 2nd 1500, a wind blew and the vessels conducted by the Spaniard Vinzenz Yanez Pinzón, which disembarked on the Brazilian land, to, right after, continued his voyage to the Caribbean. The first name given to the community was Santa Maria de La Consolación, and, then, Jubarana and, today, Ponta Grossa, after the lofty cliff (75m high) first edge of land seen from the sea and known as Tijubarana Cape. In 1996, a project named “Minifazenda Marinha”, funded by the Bank of the Northeast was implanted. The project was completed in 1999, and was developed by a multi-disciplinary team which had as coordinator Prof. Masayoshi Ogawa of LARAq (Water Resources Lab) within the Fishery Engineering Department.The objective of this project was to obtain bioecological knowledge on lobster aiming at providing studies for the maintenance andrecovery of the stock of this species, which is an important fishing resource in the Brazilian northeast. Several works have been carried out alongside the one to fatten the lobster, and among them is the study on the socio-economic aspects of the fishing community of Ponta Grossa. Therefore, the dissertation starts with a contextualization of concepts, definitions and relations of local sustainability, followed by the characterization of socio-economic aspects and, finally with oceanographic xi features. The general objective was to discover how the community represents its social relation with the natural world within the environmental sustainability and how these representations have been materialized along the years, taking into account the study of the community socio-economic characterization, assessing the use and occupation of space, harmonizing the relationship of the various elements of the local ecosystem. With specific objective we analyzed the socio-economic impacts of the activities taking place along the years, by means of a comparative analysis of situations observed in two space of time: first, in 1996 and, later, in 2002-2003. Under the request of local fishermen, we also carried out the oceanographic characterization of the region by means of bathymetric survey, measurement of currents and tide of the internal shallow platform of the region under study, aiming at future implantations of projects of sea aquiculture.