Combater as secas e defender as florestas a natureza nos desafios da ciência e da técnica para modernizar o Brasil (1889 a 1934)

In the first decades of 20th century the just instituted Brazilian Republic faced the challenge to modernize the country. Considering that the progress was associated with the exhaustion of the forest reserves and with climatic changes, two big issues were seen as fundamental: To Fight the Droughts and To Defend the Forests; headed by professionals who were dedicated to these ideals. This research starts from the premise that these were the main challenges enforced by nature to the Brazilian development; the general objective was delimited in the search to understand the meaning and the conception of the natural world by this group of professionals who faced the shock between modernizing the country and conserving its natural resources. Aiming to contribute with the construction of the Brazilian environmental history and to bring historical elements to the debate about the environment in the country, the author concentrates his attention to the analyses, the discussions and the actions that preceded the regulation on the use of natural resources and the implementation of the environmental legislation in Brazil, occurred in 1934. The investigation uses as methodological basis the theoretical directions of environmental history, using sources of data still little explored and valued. In such way, it is taken as starting point some published papers about this subject during the period between 1889 and 1934 in two technical magazines the Revista Brazil Ferro-Carril and the Revista do Club de Engenharia. National engineering played a basic role in this process while arguing, projecting and constructing the development. The formulated proposals, after being divulged, had fomented the interchange with other professionals and had favored the advance of ambient questions in Brazil, in the sense to preserve natural resources, to construct more harmonic relations between the society and the nature and to equate the development with the environment preservation

Henrique Novaes: técnica, território e cidade em uma trajetória profissional: Brasil, primeira metade do século XX

The career of civil engineer Henrique de Novaes, a remarkable figure in the academic, technical and political fields, demonstrates its extensive and relevant work across Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century. It covered from the design of water supply and sewage works, road and rail transport networks, works against drought in the Northeast, hydroelectric and harbor facilities to the urbanization planning and architectural projects, which displays a systematic and multiple production. City and territory conformed to his fields of verification, practical and above all, transformation. The search for understanding of the inclusion of a social actor in this process thus contributes to the specific analysis of the doings of Henrique de Novaes, who graduated at Polytechnic School of Rio de Janeiro in 1906. From a polymorphic activity in different scales, one tries to figure how, through academic education or professional practice, urban history in Brazil can be told or built. The introduction of technological innovations matched the purposes of planning and urban sprawl, as well as met the specifications of regulation and institutionalization of public infrastructure services at the time. The overall plans proposed by the engineer thought of the city as a whole, interconnected to the structural networks. At the same time, the knowledge of a larger physical scale the territory bounces back in the urban in a relationship of reciprocity and completeness. The objective research, therefore, tries to understand the roles played by Henrique de Novaes s works and academic education in the accomplishment of systematic modernization of Brazilian urban space and territory, recovering a little known historical figure by current historiography. It is proposed, as methodological axis, that the study of this professional career configures itself as an essential element for understanding the idea of progress embodied in the technical studies and proposals for improvements and sanitation nationwide in the first half of the twentieth century . The primary sources for the construction of this analysis were technical articles in journals of the period ( Clube de Engenharia , Viação e Revista Brasileira de Engenharia ), and technical reports, government messages, newspaper articles published at the time, autobiographical reports and the engineer s verbal communications with relatives. The work is structured in three chapters: "Biographical traces, academic education and 'technical and political' activities" illustrates the initiation into the technical, public and political environment; Chapter 2, "Technique and territory" outlines his network understanding through sanitation and transport services; Chapter 3 "Technique and City" describes the influence of polytechnics knowledge on the propositions of modernization of cities; Finally, "Final Thoughts: An Evaluation," presents an overview of the affiliations and practice of an engineer in the different scales, and its contribution to the modernization of Brazilian urban and territorial space