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Book Review
| Um Sopro de Destruição: Pensamento Político e Crítica Ambiental No Brasil Escravista, 1786–1888 [A Destructive Wind: Political Thought and Environmental Criticism in Slave Brazil, 1786–1888]. By José Augusto Pádua. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2002. 318 pp. Bibliography. Paper $24.00.
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| One of the greatest Brazilian historians, Sérgio B. Holanda, distinguishes between the attitude of the "conquerors" of North America—whose actions were intended to transform the territory rationally—and Portuguese colonization, which coveted the immediate enjoyment of the natural riches. Such an attitude of "harvesting without planting" was responsible for uncontrollable devastation, along successive "Eldorados": those of mining, sugar, tobacco, and coffee. |
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Within the panorama of this sad legacy common to various other Latin-American countries, saving the history of other types of practices related to the natural environment from oblivion becomes valuable. Such a task has been undertaken by José Augusto Pádua. Starting from the research of political texts written between 1786 and 1888, the author selected about fifty thinkers dedicated to reflecting on the natural world and the destiny of Brazil. |
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He carries out this task with the intention of pointing out another tradition. In Brazil in the nineteenth century, there was a markedly political, scientific, and progress-orientated bias toward an argument favoring new attitudes in relation to the environment. Anchored in the value of nature by virtue of its economic and political potential, many thinkers came to think of the continuing destruction of nature in the territory not as the "price of progress," but as the "price of backwardness." |
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The condition of being on the colonial and postcolonial periphery did not stop or "delay" the emergence of such new sensitivity. The perception of the effects of the continuing devastation allied itself with the scientific knowledge garnered from the European universities and botanical gardens and spread among the Brazilian intellectuals, themselves mostly graduates of European universities. Once back in the tropics, they became privileged observers of the changes to the land, the rivers and the climate, as well as of the disappearance of species. |
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Faced with this tradition and its masking by the victory of the continuing practices of destruction in Brazil, the author shows us how an intense dialogue on nature took place over several decades. He cites, especially, the stimulating intellectual movement, debated up to the present day, in which the environmental question becomes one of the biggest impasses in a country that contains a significant part of the Amazon rain forest. |
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Warren Dean, in studying the history of the Atlantic forest, narrated in detail the merciless exploitation of the natural resources existing there. According to Dean, the textbooks in Brazil should begin with this observation: "Children, you live in a desert; we are going to tell you how it was that you were disinherited." Pádua's perspective opens up another option for countries with a colonial past, offering them a different perspective of the same history. Starting from his reading of the question, our provocative opening can be different from that proposed by Dean: "Children, you live in a desert; but we are going to show you that many wished to construct another society, based on other values and practices." |
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Regina Horta Duarte is associate professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and member of the Executive Committee of Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental (SOLCHA). |
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