DOUBLY REBELLIOUS: CARLOS WALTER PORTO-GONÇALVES, GEOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICAL ECOLOGIES

Abstract

This article is a tribute to Brazilian geographer Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves (1949-2023). It contains a brief analysis of one of the facets of his career as well as of his political-social engagement: his contribution to the interdisciplinary and praxical field called political ecology - or preferably, to political ecologies, in the plural. In fact, Carlos Walter, more than anyone else, helped us understand how much we are faced, in this case, with a plurality of knowledges, and not a monolith without fissures (or a homogeneous narrative).

Carlos Walter was one of the pioneers of the radical movement that renewed Brazilian geography at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s. However, his intellectual production and his way of seeing geography presented a significant peculiarity, which distinguished his contribution (both his academic works and his life as an activist) from that of the overwhelming majority of human geographers of his generation: unlike these, who explicitly or tacitly sought to reconstruct geography as a whole as a ‘pure social science’ - therefore neglecting or even disdaining the geobiophysical dimension of material reality -, Carlos Walter never denied or underestimated the value of scientific or popular knowledge about ‘nature.’ Sure, he did it from a perspective that treated ‘nature’ always as something historically and culturally situated; nevertheless, it was an epistemological viewpoint that welcomed dialogue with natural science (physical geography included), and, furthermore, that highlighted the importance of vernacular knowledge about the geobiophysical aspects of concrete lifeworlds.