Water, Culture and the Environment at the Internal Borders of Panama

Abstract

Addressing the linkages between the environment, culture and the vision of natural resources in a given territory should take into account the environmental problems of the present. Cultural expressions of the social conflicts associated with such problems are the result of human interventions in ecosystems. These interventions respond to the need to transform into natural resources a segment of the elements that are part of these ecosystems, using socially organized processes of work and using complex technologies and procedures, corresponding to the social relations prevailing in society that use these resources. The reorganization of nature resulting from these interventions, in turn, generates transformations in the social structures and mentalities of human groups. In this way, by modifying the natural systems upon which human beings depend for their existence, it opens the way, usually without knowing or desiring it, to the formation and development of contradictions in the social systems on which their organization depends as a species and the processing of such systems. According to the degree of development of each society, this process can be limited to a purely local scale or reach a planetary scale, both in its direct results and in the projection of its consequences on ecosystems and distant social forms of life. In this sense, the visions of the natural world and their corresponding behaviors, that is, the environmental culture of each society express both the internal relations between the groups that integrate it and those that it maintains with the other societies. Thus, the view of any particular element of the ecosystems present in the environment of society is determined in time and space by the changes that occur both in relation to the value of this element for the life of its members, and the function it can fulfill in its relations with the other human groups with which it shares the same territory or with the planet Earth itself.