José Augusto Pádua on the Brazilian Amazon: Current Crisis and History of Deforestation

Georgetown Environmental History recently sat down with renowned Brazilian environmental historian José Augusto Pádua in Rio de Janeiro to have a conversation about fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. We asked him about the relationship between fire and deforestation, the history of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, and who is responsible for the recent surge in deforestation. Check out the video below for his answers. 

Video Guide
What is the relationship between fire and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
00:05-02:51
 
What is the history of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
02:52-04:31: Deforestation prior to 1970s
04:32-12:06: Decades of destruction, 1970s-1990s
12:07-15:47: Improvements, 2004-2014
 
Who is responsible for deforestation in the in the Brazilian Amazon?
15:48-22:01
 
What was the catalyst for the current crisis (June-October, 2019)?
22:02-30:19. 

Author Biography
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​José Augusto Pádua is a professor of environmental history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Institute of History, where he is a co-coordinator of the Laboratório de História e Natureza (Environment and History Laboratory). He a specialist in the history of the Brazilian Amazon and has been studying the forest and doing fieldwork there since the 1970s. He is the author of numerous books and chapters about Brazilian environmental history, including “Brazil in the History of the Anthropocene” in Liz-Rejane Issberner and Philippe Léna (eds.) Brazil in the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2017), 19-40, “Civil Society and Environmentalism in Brazil: The Twentieth Century’s Great Acceleration” in Lise Sedrez and S. Ravi Rajan (eds.) The Great Convergence: Environmental Histories of the BRICS (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 113-134, and “The Dilemma of the ‘Splendid Cradle’: Nature and Territory in the Construction of Brazil” in José Augusto Pádua, John Soluri, and Claudia Leal (eds.) A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 91-114.