{"title":"Nature’s revenge: War on the wilderness during the opening of Brazil’s ‘Last Western Frontier’","authors":"S. D. E. Silva","doi":"10.22459/IREH.05.01.2019.02","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article seeks to identify the key confrontations between frontier expansion and nature present in the discourses and documents generated by the ‘The March toward the West’ (Marcha para o Oeste), a Brazilian federal policy of territorial occupation initiated during the first half of the twentieth century. The paper identifies the representation of the frontiersmen of the Brazilian West, dealing with the creation of the heroic image of the road-building engineer Bernardo Sayão. Sayão was responsible for the construction of the 2,169 km highway that connects Brasília, the then new federal capital, to Belém, located in Brazil’s Amazon region. In 1959, shortly before the completion of this major road, Sayão died in a dramatic accident, crushed by a falling tree. Research for this paper was based on biographical accounts, combined with studies generated by environmental historians and historical geographers.","PeriodicalId":34502,"journal":{"name":"International Review of Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Review of Environmental History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.22459/IREH.05.01.2019.02","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
This article seeks to identify the key confrontations between frontier expansion and nature present in the discourses and documents generated by the ‘The March toward the West’ (Marcha para o Oeste), a Brazilian federal policy of territorial occupation initiated during the first half of the twentieth century. The paper identifies the representation of the frontiersmen of the Brazilian West, dealing with the creation of the heroic image of the road-building engineer Bernardo Sayão. Sayão was responsible for the construction of the 2,169 km highway that connects Brasília, the then new federal capital, to Belém, located in Brazil’s Amazon region. In 1959, shortly before the completion of this major road, Sayão died in a dramatic accident, crushed by a falling tree. Research for this paper was based on biographical accounts, combined with studies generated by environmental historians and historical geographers.
本文试图确定“向西方进军”(Marcha para o Oeste)所产生的话语和文件中存在的边界扩张与自然之间的关键对抗,这是一项始于20世纪上半叶的巴西联邦领土占领政策。本文确定了巴西西部拓荒者的形象,涉及道路建设工程师贝尔纳多·萨约英雄形象的塑造。Sayão负责修建2169公里的高速公路,该高速公路连接当时的新联邦首都巴西利亚和位于巴西亚马逊地区的贝伦。1959年,在这条主要道路完工前不久,Sayão死于一场戏剧性的事故,被一棵倒下的树砸死。本文的研究基于传记,结合环境历史学家和历史地理学家的研究。