JOSÉ LUIZ DE ANDRADE FRANCO AND JOSÉ AUGUSTO DRUMMOND

wilderness and the
BRAZILIAN MIND (II)
THE FIRST BRAZILIAN CONFERENCE ON NATURE PROTECTION
(RIO DE JANEIRO, 1934)

ABSTRACT

This article examines the First Brazilian Conference on Nature Protection—held in Rio de Janeiro, in 1934, a founding event of the Brazilian environmental movement—in terms of science, policy, and activism. It was called by a small group of natural scientists and associates, responsible for the first modern and systematic statements about the protection of the Brazilian natural heritage. All but forgotten nowadays, the event is examined in several dimensions, based on the proceedings edited by Alberto José Sampaio, Brazil's leading botanist at the time. The article argues that the conference provided a sample of the existing modes of environmental concern and that it brought together the most relevant individuals and organizations. It pays attention to a recurrent theme of the need to protect Brazil's natural endowment as a means to provide a basis for the construction of a new, modern Brazilian national identity. Special attention is given to the breadth of environmental concerns addressed in the meeting, to the convergence of different outlooks and proposals, and to the influence of relevant non-Brazilian issues, policies, and organizations. Utilitarian and aesthetic reasons for protecting nature converged toward the construction of a shared project of national economic power, scientific research, and cultural fulfillment.

THE FIRST BRAZILIAN CONFERENCE on Nature Protection, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1934, was a founding event of the Brazilian environmental movement. This study of that conference is part of an ongoing research effort to rescue the ideas and work of a relatively cohesive group of Brazilian scientists who, from the 1920s to the 1940s, were deeply concerned with nature conservation and protection. These scientists, although today scarcely known even by environmentally concerned scientists and activists, managed to engage in systematic, long-term scientific research on conservation issues and to publish extensively about their findings, ideas, and proposals. They also achieved a fair degree of influence over institutional and policy issues.	1
Figure 1. Cover of the March 1935 issue of the Boletim do Museu Nacional. José Luiz de Andrade Franco, private collection.
These scientists and their associates called the 1934 conference. In this meeting, many topics and approaches to nature conservation were broadly discussed in Brazil for the first time. The event was held in the nation's capital, on the eve of the meeting of a Constitutional Assembly elected a few months earlier for the purpose of writing a new constitution for Brazil. It is relevant to add that important legal provisions and principles related to the natural environment were introduced in 1934 or a few years later, arguably related to the impact of the conference and to the individual and collective influence that some of its participants had in several social and institutional spheres.	. . .