The Brazilian national territory has traditionally been analyzed in terms of large biogeographic regions, in which the classification of biomes is the current and the most widely used for planning, development, and environmental conservation purposes in Brazil. The Amazon and the Cerrado are the two largest Brazilian biomes and together occupy more than 70% of Brazil’s surface area. In contrast to the Amazon, the Cerrado has been considered by the government as a biome to be sacrificed, or largely have its environment exploited, by the expansion of large-scale intensified agriculture. By drawing on environmental history, Dutra e Silva seeks to analyze the different historical perceptions of this biome, involving ecological and political assumptions that have been incorporated over the years and defined the Cerrado as a blooming frontier.

Speaker: Sandro Dutra e Silva 

Sandro Dutra e Silva has a PhD in History from the University of Brasília (UnB). He works as a professor and researcher at the Evangelical University of Goiás and the State University of Goiás and is coordinator of the Cerrado Environmental History Laboratory. He served as a Visiting Scholar at UCLA (2015-2016) and is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University (2024-2025). He is the author of several articles on the agrarian and environmental history of Brazil, with an emphasis on the Cerrado biome and also author of the book “No Oeste, a Terra e o Céu: a Expansão da Fronteria Agrícola no Brasil Central” (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X, 2017). His studies have sought to analyze the relationship between society and nature in Central Brazil, particularly the environmental history of the Cerrado, the Brazilian Tropical Savanna, dialoguing with the history of agriculture, history of science, and environmental history.

Webinar ID# 988 8967 2501 Passcode: 116266

Sponsor(s): Latin American Institute, Department of Geography