ABSTRACT
When the Portuguese commander Pedro Alvarez Cabral first sighted Brazil on Easter Sunday in the year 1500, the Atlantic coast of the land he christened “Santa Cruz” was covered with a resplendent tropical forest which occupied approximately 100 million ha (Mha), an area 12 times that of Portugal. Until 1961, when the Brazil’s capital was relocated from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, it was the Atlantic forest region which stretched from the state of Rio Grande do Norte in the northeast to Rio Grande do Sul in the extreme south that hosted virtually all of the country’s agricultural and pasture production. The history of the anthropogenic devastation of this forest region, which to a large degree was the result of completely nonsustainable agricultural activities, has been described in detail by Dean (1995).
