"Deforesting for Progress? Environmental Debates and the Coffee Economy in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1889"

During the second half of the nineteenth century, São Paulo’s expanding coffee economy confronted a growing ecological and political dilemma: how to sustain agricultural growth without exhausting the forests that underpinned it. This paper examines contemporary debates on deforestation and resource management in São Paulo during the Brazilian Empire, focusing on how landowners, agronomists, and policymakers understood the environmental challenges created by coffee expansion. Drawing on the local press, municipal regulations, and public reports, I reconstruct how deforestation was discussed both as a threat to agricultural productivity – through soil exhaustion, altered rainfall, and the loss of valuable timber – and as a necessary step toward progress and modernization. By tracing these conflicting narratives, the paper reveals that environmental concerns were not absent from the nineteenth-century coffee frontier but were deeply entangled with the economic and political logics of the plantation system.