A Bicycle Journey Across Brazil to Find a Vanishing Savanna

In the short film “Here There Was Cerrado,” environmental historian Natascha Otoya documents a weeklong bicycle journey of more than 200 miles through Brazil’s western Bahia and Tocantins regions. The Cerrado, once covering nearly 800,000 square miles, is the world’s most biodiverse savanna and Brazil’s second-largest biome. Yet over the past 40 years, more than half has been cleared for cattle pasture and vast single-crop fields of corn and soy, much of it grown for export as animal feed. Otoya’s film shows how this agricultural expansion is transforming the landscape and altering water flows.

The bicycle journey served both as research and as a way to encounter the region at a pace that made conversations with local people possible, revealing stories and perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked. Alongside seemingly endless irrigated fields, Otoya reaches the edge of an agricultural plateau and looks down on an intact Cerrado landscape: a varied mosaic of grasslands, wooded savannas, and gallery forests rich in plants and wildlife. The film’s title points to a further consequence of destruction: as ecosystems disappear, people’s memories of what once existed can change too. Otoya argues that environmental history should inform advocacy and public policy, and that documentary filmmaking can bring this research to audiences who may not read scholarly work.