Monopoly of the waters

deforestation, appropriation and urbanization in Ribeirão Preto, 1870-1950

Abstract

This article presents aspects of the history of the appropriation of the natural and urban landscape of northeastern São Paulo during the coffee-growing cycle, by referring to professionals who travelled through the region during that period: Pierre Monbeig and Saturnino de Brito. Without losing sight of the reading of these characters, the article gives a brief history of the appropriation of nature in this territory, especially occupied by the farms surrounding the city of Ribeirão Preto, in two stages: (i) agricultural expansion during the coffee cycle, which began in 1870 and is characterised as a fairly radical movement of landscape transformation; (ii) the appropriation of water in the context of urbanisation by the Power and Light Company. In this sense, the article problematizes some of the processes in the environmental history of this region in the two contexts that caused great devastation to the  transitional biome between the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest. It also points out the environmental injustices of the urban sanitation infrastructure managed by the coffee-rowing shareholders, who formed a regional monopoly on sanitation and electricity. Thus, rescuing these authors serves to demonstrate the destructive force of this economic cycle of coffee exports on nature, as well as exposing the environmental injustices generated by urbanisation processes.