Reflexões sobre o uso cotidiano da água para consumo humano a partir da pesquisa de opinião "O Olhar Gaúcho Sobre a Água"

Abstract

Water is the subject of this dissertation and in order to approach it we use a survey called "Rio Grande do Sul Population's View About Water" which as carried out by Health Bureau of the State of Rio Grande do Sul and the Center of Health Vigilance from the State of Rio Grande do Sul. It was used descriptive and multivariate statistics proceedings. The data analysis aims to answer questions about the use of water for human being consume in hygiene activities and in home activities in order to find out Rio Grande do Sul population's opinion about the use of water for human being consume. The aim of this paper is to establish a relation among these opinion and the environment and the reflexivity in order to: 1) build a profile of people and their attitude to the daily use of water; 2) make deeper the discusion about precaution, risk society and reflexivity; 3) verify the Rio Grande do Sul population's knowledge about the environmental risk factors; 4) propuse guidelines for planning State actions about consume of water. The reflections are given from the perspective of: 1) Environmental Sociology defined by Buttel (2000, 2001, 2002); 2) the concepts of Habitus and Fields from Bordieu (1983a, b, 1990, 1993, 1996, 1998) in order to understand the relations between representation and social reality of the human being daily use of water; 3) Social Reflexivity, Risk Society from Giddens (1991, 1995, 2000) and Beck (1995, 1998, 2000) to find out if the population reflexivity and the sense of risk related to the lack of water consume match with the daily use; 4) Precaution, in agreement with the idea proposed at Rio+20 - United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development - in order to propose guidelines to be adopted in the State of Rio Grande do Sul to become the population conscious about the daily use of water. The data analysis indicates that most population is satisfied with the quality of water, that most population fears a lack in water supply, that population doesn't know the law about information, access and quality of water; and that population is conscious about preservation of water resources considering future generations and water availability in the earth. The data analysis also indicates a dichotomous relation between the daily use of water and the consciousness of water preservation.