A charcoal frontier: the steel industry and forest in twentieth-century Minas Gerais (Brazil)

Abstract

Focusing on the charcoal-fired steel industry in the Doce River Valley (rural eastern Brazil), this article sets out to understand the relationship between industrial-scale mining and the transition from iron factories to large steel mills. At the same time, it addresses the further destruction of the Atlantic Forest. Studies on the steel industry that highlight the pressure exerted on the Atlantic Forest by charcoal plants are almost nonexistent, however. Turning to technical reports, official statistics, journals, and other media sources and centering attention on Belgo-Mineira company, it highlights a set of data that enables us to measure the impacts of the charcoal-fired steel industry on forests. In order to get a deep insight, the main aim was to estimate the amount of forest extraction to serve the steel industry from 1936 to 1954. The data from this research show that the charcoal-fired steel industry gave a distinctive cast to the phenomenon of the agricultural frontier.