Nationalizing Nature is my first monograph, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press as part of their Latin American Studies Series. The book demonstrates how Brazil and Argentina employed national parks to develop and settle frontier areas, casting light on conservation’s crucial role in the territorial growth of the region. In the process, a distinct national park model–combining the preservation of nature and settler colonization–is highlighted. From the press: “Today, one-quarter of all the land in Latin America is set […]

Categories: History

Landscape change in Brazil’s new capital, 1970s-2010s This is a preliminary study carried out with the help of Samuel Franklin on land cover change in Brasília and its Federal District (DF) between the 1970s and 2010s. The DF is a territory of 2228 square miles carved out of the neighboring state of Goiás in 1959 when Brasília was built. Similar to the Federal District in Mexico and the District of Columbia in the United States, the Brazilian DF was created […]

Categories: History

Landscape change at the Argentine-Brazilian border, 1953-2017 This series of interactive maps are a sequel to the ones I launched in 2014.  They show deforestation and reforestation in national parks at the border between Brazil and Argentina, between the 1950s and the 2010s. They use as source aerial imagery unearthed from Brazilian archives and historical satellite pictures, including some from US spy satellites from the 1960s. The visualizations show the impressive environmental change occurring in almost seven decades, when this […]

Categories: History

Big Water is a book I edited with Jacob Blanc and published through University of Arizona Press in 2018. It is a book that focus on a overlooked Latin-American borderland, the Triple Frontier area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. From the press: “Big Water explores four centuries of the overlapping histories of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay (the Triple Frontier), and the colonies that preceded them. Examining an important area that includes some of the first national parks established in Latin […]

Categories: History