- A night fishing trip 30 years ago showed Brazilian public health doctor Apolo Heringer the meaning of health: a clean river full of fish — a notion that inspired the Manuelzão Project to restore the Velhas River Basin in southeastern Brazil.
- The basin includes Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region (BHMR), capital of Minas Gerais, the third-largest metropolitan region in Brazil and home to approximately 5.7 million people in 34 cities; here, the combination of high population density, inadequate urban planning and lack of infrastructure has damaged the rivers that cross the region.
- After sewage treatment plants began operating in the area, fish started returning to the waters; the dorado (Salminus franciscanus) was chosen as an indicator of good water quality since it needs a lot of oxygen to survive and polluted waters have low oxygen levels.
- Connections between the river, its health and people’s understanding are crucial to the Manuelzão Project and its goals for collective health.
Some 30 years ago, Apolo Heringer, a Brazilian public health doctor, was participating in a night fishing trip with residents of the community Raiz, in southeastern Brazil. That night, the fish were being caught with harpoons, and to ensure visibility, the fishers used a spotlight that illuminated the entire river. When the light first reflected what was underwater, Heringer saw what would define the next chapters of his career as a doctor: There were thousands of fish. “It was as if it were a joy to see all those fish in the clean river,” he tells Mongabay in a video call. “That’s what health is.”
In addition to being a doctor, Heringer is also a writer and a professor. He taught at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) School of Medicine for 33 years and, during his time at the university, conceived the Manuelzão Project, rooted in his realizations about fish and rivers — and health. Officially founded in 1997 as a university extension project of the UFMG medical course, today Manuelzão is an ongoing, multi- and interdisciplinary project, with the participation of students, professors and researchers from different fields such as biology, geography and communication.
The project bases its actions on the concept of collective health and understands that, just as there are no fish without rivers, there is no human health without healthy ecosystems. “Collective health is ecology. It is the balance of ecosystems. So health is a product of an ecosystem. Medical care is not health. Medical care is a service, it is the provision of a service,” Heringer says. The Manuelzão involves a range of activities in research, education and social mobilization through groups involving civil society, public authorities and the private sector. The ultimate goal is revitalizing a river basin and bringing back the fish.
As the project is based on the concept that health is intrinsically linked to ecosystems, organizers decided to operate in a territory that is home to several ecosystems: the Velhas River Basin in Minas Gerais, in the southeast. There, the project develops initiatives through the Manuelzão Centers and research through NuVelhas, the Transdisciplinary and Transinstitutional Center for the Revitalization of the Velhas River Basin. The research work involves teachers and students who monitor the river basin’s fauna, as well as citizen science and environmental education initiatives.
The Manuelzão also has an impact on public policy in the state of Minas Gerais, with the most recent initiative being the launch of “Goal 2034,” aimed at restoring total health to the river. Goal 2034 picks up where its predecessor, “Goal 2010,” left off. The two projects have had the same aims, and while Goal 2010 was indeed partially achieved in 2010, the current objective is to further revitalize the entire Velhas River Basin.
The Velhas River is 806 kilometers (500 miles) long, and its basin covers 51 municipalities and more than 4 million people. Included in the basin is the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region (BHMR), capital of Minas Gerais, the third-largest metropolitan region in Brazil and home to approximately 5.7 million people in 34 cities. Although the BHMR occupies only 10% of the total area of the basin, it concentrates more than 70% of its population. The combination of high population density, inadequate urban planning and lack of infrastructure has damaged the rivers that cross the region. And today, its waters suffer: No one navigates, fishes or swims in the BHMR.
It was this context that led the Manuelzão Project to focus Goal 2034 in the BHMR, a strategic choice that took into account the interconnected nature of a hydrographic basin. Everything is continuous, connected and fluid. It is all confluence. What happens at one point directly impacts the entire basin, either positively or negatively.
Marcus Polignano is a public health doctor, professor at UFMG and coordinator of the Manuelzão Project. He tells Mongabay via audio message that the BHMR “accounts for practically 80% of the river’s degradation. In other words, if I concentrate all policy, resource and economic efforts to revitalize the river at that specific point, we effectively have an interesting and important situation to carry out the revitalization.”
This means that since the BHMR is the most urbanized region of the basin, it also suffers greater anthropic pressure. Its waters are the main cause of degradation in the overarching Velhas basin, as the sewage dumped in the BHMR is transported to the rest of the rivers, sharing the waters with fish, amphibians, birds and countless other living beings that coexist in the territory, including people. That is why one of the project’s core activities is encouraging the revitalization of the Velhas River Basin and one way to achieve this is to ensure proper sewage collection and treatment.
In 2004, when the Manuelzão Project launched Goal 2010, the state government adopted it with big, long-term ideas in mind. “We created the first innovative strategy in terms of water management policy in Brazil, which is this strategic vision of having a revitalization goal,” Polignano says.
From there, a sewage treatment plant (ETE) was built from scratch on an important river in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area: the Onça. This ETE contributed to the sewage treatment that had already been going on since 2001 on another river in the BHMR, the Arrudas. Although the Arrudas ETE was inaugurated before Goal 2010, its construction was also influenced by the Manuelzão, according to Heringer.
The project says the volume of sewage treated by the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (COPASA) increased from 41 million cubic meters in 2003 to 85 million in 2008. In 2010, the number reached 127 million cubic meters of treated sewage. These efforts brought results, and a presence began to be noticed in the waters of BHMR.
Researchers from Manuelzão have been monitoring fish in the area since 1999, and by 2010, they had 11 years of data to work with, confirming a notable improvement in the presence of these animals in waters closer to BHMR. In previous studies, researchers noticed that fish did not approach the Belo Horizonte metropolitan area due to the amount of sewage in the water. However, after the construction of the ETEs, this scenario began to change.
Carlos Mascarenhas, a biologist at Manuelzão and coordinator of Nuvelhas, the project’s research center, tells Mongabay via audio message, “The fauna changed as water quality improved. So fish that used to only be found farther downstream in the basin … began to appear closer to Belo Horizonte.”
“The return of fish to the river” is the main objective of the Manuelzão Project, now and then, as the animal is understood as a bioindicator; that is, a living being used to indicate the quality of an ecosystem. Many animals can be bioindicators, but a fish was chosen because it is “genuine to the waters, charismatic, photogenic, mobilizing and even ‘loved’ by its human predators,” according to the project’s website.
In 2018, the dorado (Salminus franciscanus) was chosen as the symbolic fish of the Velhas River Basin, as it is considered a demanding fish that needs a lot of oxygen to survive. Since polluted waters have low oxygen levels — because bacteria that decompose organic matter, such as feces, urine and food scraps, consume most of it — the presence of dorado is understood to be an indicator of good water quality.
But that’s not all. Heringer also emphasizes the economic and social dimension of the animal. Typically, when rivers are damaged, “It is the poor who are left with polluted water, who cannot use it for farming, for the animals they have … because the animals die with polluted water and they don’t have fish either; if they do, they can’t eat. … [Fish] is an economic dispute for life,” Heringer says.
But even with these efforts, the 2010 Goal was not fully achieved: It was still not possible to swim in the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region. “To swim, we needed better water quality and also sewage treatment plants” that could treat the water to a higher level with “the removal of bacteria and these organic contaminants,” Polignano says.
Universal sanitation goals
It is in this scenario that the Manuelzão Project’s Goal 2034 builds on the 2010 Goal, also keeping pace with changes in Brazilian law. In July 2020, the New Legal Framework for Sanitation was enacted, one of whose objectives is to universalize sanitation in the country. The law states that by 2033, 90% of the country’s population must have access to collection and sewage treatment and 99% access to drinking water. “We understand that 2034 is a decisive year for these policies to be effectively implemented,” Polignano says.
The current goal is to restore the waters at the epicenter of degradation, between the cities of Itabirito and Santa Luzia, two cities in the BHMR. Here, the waters are designated as Class 4, the worst quality classification, according to Resolution 357/2005 of the National Environment Council. “It’s not a river, it’s a sewer,” Heringer says. The aim is to reach Class 2, waters that allow navigation and fishing in addition to being suitable for human consumption after conventional treatment.
These goals show how the Manuelzão Project works to transform the relationship between humans and Planet Earth, reinforcing the idea that everything is connected. Ana Lúcia Fernandes Mendonça, a theologian and the educational coordinator of a theology course for lay people in Minas Gerais, not involved in Manuelzão, first learned about the project in the 1990s during a geography class. She has followed the project’s work since then and says Manuelzão’s activities are essential for protecting ecosystems because they “bring together science, education and social mobilization to restore rivers, preserve biodiversity and promote a more balanced relationship between people and nature.”
And it is this more balanced relationship that contributes to the promotion of human health that Manuelzão believes in. But when the project began, these relationships were poorly understood. “Medical students don’t want to know why people are sick, they want to know how to give them medicine,” Heringer says. “So, if there are worms, they give medicine for worms, but they don’t have much spontaneous interest in fighting the cause of the worms, which is polluted water. The Manuelzão project made a proposal … and medicine began to understand that if the fish return and the water is clean, fewer people will get sick. And this became recognized, it became a normal idea.” And that is why, in essence, Manuelzão’s work is about narratives.
Fish, rivers, health & narratives: The essence of the Manuelzão Project
These connections — between the river, its health and people’s understanding — are crucial to the project.
“Manuelzão” is a Portuguese nickname for a common name in Brazil, Manuel. It is also the name of a famous character in Brazilian literature created by Guimarães Rosa, an important writer of the 20th century. The poet, novelist, diplomat and doctor from Minas Gerais wrote of a character in the book Manuelzão e Miguilim, inspired by Manuel Nardi, a cowboy who lived his entire life in Minas Gerais. He lived in harmony with the land and rivers and also inspired the name of the UFMG medical school project.
Guimarães Rosa is known for his unique work with the Portuguese language, experimenting and reinventing words. Thus, it is no surprise that the Manuelzão Project also works with narratives.
“The Manuelzão Project is not a project to clean up the river, clean the river, remove pollution,” Heringer says. “The Manuelzão Project is a project to change the mentality of the Earth.”
Banner image: Confluence of the Velhas and São Francisco rivers in Barra do Guaicuí. Image courtesy of Leo Boi/CBH Velhas.
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