GoKawiilEnvironmental Historian Bikes 200 Miles Through Brazil's Cerrado to Document Its Decline
In 2025, environmental historian Natascha Otoya cycled more than 200 miles across western Bahia and Tocantins in Brazil's Cerrado savanna as part of postdoctoral research with the Universidade Evangélica de Goiás. She filmed the journey, contrasting vast monoculture farmland with a remaining intact stretch of the biome's grasslands, woodland and forest habitat.
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The Cerrado has lost more than half its original extent to cattle ranching and crop production over four decades, much of it feeding export markets, making documentation of what remains relevant to conservation debates. Otoya says she made the film because documentary formats can reach the public and inform policy more effectively than academic papers alone, suggesting her project is aimed at shaping advocacy rather than just archiving research.
- Otoya cycled over 200 miles through Brazil's Cerrado in 2025 for postdoctoral research.
- The Cerrado, Brazil's second-largest biome, has lost over half its area to agriculture in 40 years.
- Otoya produced a film from the trip to make environmental history more publicly accessible.
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Published there as: “A Bicycle Journey Across Brazil to Find a Vanishing Savanna”
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