6 - The View from Above

Summary

This last chapter recreates the changes in the landscape inside the two parks and their surrounding area. To do so, it uses a trove of more than 800 aerial images from 1953 to 1980 (as well as government reports, newspaper articles, and legal cases) to reconstruct the landscape before, during, and after the settlement of tens of thousands of settlers at the borderland. The chapter documents the role of logging, as carried out by Brazilian colonization companies with indigenous labor, in permanently transforming the native subtropical Atlantic forest into cropland. It also cast light on road building as one of the factors allowing migration to the region. Inside the park, the chapter argues that what is now seen as pristine nature – the forested landscape of the parks – is the fruit of decades of often contradictory policies and practices.