“Will our children’s children’s children see?”: The soap opera Pantanal and Environmental Education in Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract

The Pantanal biome currently has great notoriety in the face of the telenovela ‘Pantanal’, recorded in the Mato Grosso do Sul region, a place with tourist scenarios, of immense biodiversity and aspects that are broadcast in “prime time” by Brazilian television. In the telenovela, relevant themes about socio-environmental issues are addressed, such as sustainable agricultural production, society's relationship with the land in an affective perspective, the use of clean technologies, local environmental problems such as fires, drought, species extinction and actions anthropic in the region. Emphasizing this, we chose to discuss the themes from the perspective of Environmental Education. Thus, considering the televised work, a discussion was presented on how this literature can corroborate the reflection of socio-environmental issues present in the Pantanal biome, especially in the contribution of themes related to public policies of Environmental Education, concerning the legal and educational processes present in the constitution of the environmental dimension in a critical perspective. In this way, dialogues were identified between the characters about fake news and the denialism currently present in socio-environmental discourses. Furthermore, themes that are of an economic, political, cultural and environmental nature must be discussed in an interdisciplinary and/or transversal approach between curricular components such as Science, Biology, Geography, Mathematics, History, etc.