Brazil

Brazil is the largest country in South America, covering an area of 8.5 million square kilometers and with a population of approximately 170 million people, according to the 2000 census. Brazil encompasses several distinct biomes, notably some 4 million square kilometers of the Amazon basin, as well as the Atlantic forest (which once covered some 1.4 million square kilometers) and the Pantanal, the world's largest interior wetland (110,000 square kilometers).

Human occupation in what is now Brazil appears to have begun at least 11,500 years ago, based on pottery shards found in the Amazon. Estimates of the indigenous population of Brazil upon European contact in 1500 have ranged widely, and recent estimates have been higher, up to 5 million. The higher estimates are based on growing evidence of greater pre-Columbian environmental alterations than previously recognized.

The Portuguese discovery of Brazil led to colonization efforts beginning in the 16th century. This led to a series of boom-bust economic cycles, each featuring a specific natural resource exported to Europe by the colonizers. The first product was Brazilwood, used for dye; this went into decline by 1600. Sugar plantations had emerged along the Atlantic coast by then, and this stimulated forest clearing and conflicts and enslavement of indigenous peoples. In the late 19th century, coffee became the preeminent export product.

Consequently, railways spread across São Paulo and other states of southern Brazil, enabling expansion of the agricultural frontier. This facilitated forest clearing in the Brazilian interior, which provided fuelwood for coastal Brazilian industry in the early 20th century. Interior colonization and incipient industrialization thus greatly reduced Brazil's indigenous population, as well as the Atlantic forest.

After World War II, new medical technologies facilitated population growth by reducing mortality, prompting rural-urban migration and the expansion of an industrial workforce. Brazil's urban populations, especially in its largest cities, grew rapidly. This proceeded via unplanned construction of new housing in the peripheries of many towns, resulting in considerable pollution via untreated disposal of [Page 166]raw human waste as well as accumulation or burning of garbage. A notable exception to this pattern is the city of Curitiba, which beginning in the 1960s planned its urban expansion via zoning measures and waste management.

Brazil's military took control of the government in 1964 and embarked on policies of “authoritarian capitalism” that paired repression of labor unions with incentives for industrial development and frontier expansion into the Amazon. Brazil's economic growth accelerated in the late 1960s, called The Brazilian Miracle, but industrial pollution also rapidly increased. The industrial town of Cubatão subsequently became infamous for its extremely polluted air and water, as well as its high rates of cancer and birth defects.

By the late 1970s, economic growth slowed and Brazil's financial status worsened, eventually leading to democratic elections in the 1980s. However, growing environmental problems were overshadowed by Brazil's economic crisis. Civilian politicians focused primarily on national development rather than environmental protection. Large projects, such as the Carajás iron mine in the Amazon and the hydroelectric dam at Iguaú Falls, were given priority.

Nonetheless, 1988 proved to be a bellwether year, as demonstrations and lobbying in the national capital of Brasília led to recognition of environmental patrimony and indigenous rights in Brazil's new constitution. On Christmas day that year, the rubber tapper Chico Mendes was assassinated by ranchers for defending the forest, ending a year of record deforestation and burning in the Amazon, which placed the deforestation issue before the international community. Brazil's government responded with the “Our Nature” program and voiced concerns about foreign intervention in the Amazon as a threat to Brazil's national sovereignty.

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