Brazilian Environmental Policy - A Short Biography, 1934-2020

By José Augusto Drummond, Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari and Ana Flávia Granja e Barros

In less than 60 pages, the authors summarize and analyze 90 years of Brazilian environmental laws and policies. They select the most important norms and policies, examine their origins, and evaluate their goals and effectiveness, besides looking into the agencies in charge of their enforcement or execution. The text works both as an introduction to this complex field and as a broad and seasoned account that will interest experts. Drummond, Capelari and Platiau have studied these matters for decades. They have tried to pull together their findings and insights and present them in this compact, user-friendly text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Editora Appris
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9786525028101

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Brazilian environmental policy

a short biography, 1934-2020

Editora Appris Ltda.

1.ª Edição - Copyright© 2022 dos autores

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Bibliotecária CRB 9/870

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José Augusto Drummond

Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari

Ana Flávia Granja e Barros

Brazilian environmental policy

a short biography, 1934-2020

PREFACE

Since the mid-1930s the construction of a legal framework and the consolidation of environmental policies and movements aimed at protecting the natural environment in Brazil have gone through nine decades of stops and goes. This text deals with this unsteady development but tries to explain the contexts and reasons behind such wavering and sifts through the year-to-year facts in order to identify the outcomes of this protracted process.

For example, between the late 1700s and mid-1800s, as shown by Pádua (2002), a group of approximately 50 Portuguese and Brazilian writers published more than 150 texts expressing concerns about soil erosion, forest destruction, depletion of mines, and related subjects. These authors were influenced by the general outlook of the Enlightenment - their texts were political, based on science, anthropocentric and focused on the requirements of economic progress. At this time, any concern with nature stemmed from its importance for Brazil’s colonial contributions to the Portuguese economy and later for the construction of an independent Brazilian nation. These authors - José Bonifácio is the best known among them - saw natural resources as Brazil’s strongest asset for economic progress. However, the impressive number of these texts, their dense contents and the sharp analysis of most of their authors were all but forgotten until Pádua unearthed them from solemn archives and forsaken bookshelves.

Later, close to the end of the Brazilian Imperial regime (which lasted from 1822-1889), a loosely knit group of prominent authors such as Joaquim Nabuco, André Rebouças, Francisco Freire Alemão, Guilherme Capanema and Nicolau Moreira wrote caustic critiques of the environmental destruction perpetrated by the dominant predatory regime of agricultural production. Nabuco and Rebouças, like Bonifácio before them, linked environmental degradation to the widespread use of slave labor, highlighting the deep backwardness of both. As Brazil’s economy was agricultural and based on slave labor, this outlook made them more social critics than environmental critics. Alemão and Capanema, on the other hand, blamed environmental degradation on technological ignorance and incompetence (PÁDUA, 2002). Despite the sharpness of these critics, there was not a general environmental awareness or mobilization that could support and spread their ideas. Indeed, at this time such an awareness or mobilization hardly existed anywhere in the world.

Brazil’s First Republic (1889-1930) saw the emergence of a first and sparse generation of scientists who voiced concerns about the destruction of the environment and natural resources. They were all foreigners who worked in Brazil, a fact that helped spread their ideas. The most prominent of them were Herman von Ihering, Alberto Loefgren e Orville Derby. Despite suffering many setbacks, they raised issues that future scientists and activists would take on. They also managed to create Brazil’s first official protected area, known today as the Serra da Cantareira State Park, located in the state of São Paulo. (FRANCO & DRUMMOND, 2009).

A second and more cohesive generation of environmentally concerned scientists, writers, government officials and citizens appeared in the 1930s. They were all Brazilians, an important new fact. In that decade ideas and actions about the protection of nature became more consistent. This is clear in the Forest Code and in the Water and Mines Code, both issued in 1934. These