Liberal landscape project

could we "improve" the planet's arid spaces?

Abstract

Would it be possible to improve the planet's arid spaces? Based on this question, this article aims to shed light on the transnational perspective of the debates, ideas and projects that were presented in the second half of the 19th century in the face of the socio-environmental catastrophes that hit the “sertões” of the caatinga in northeastern Brazil. In this sense, emphasis was placed on the references of André Rebouças and Saturnino de Brito, who constructed a more radical appropriation of the liberal references of British projects to transform the arid Indian landscape. At the end of the article, however, the materialist and environmental critique of the social processes unleashed by liberal imperialism, particularly British imperialism, which led to the deaths of more than 30 million inhabitants of British colonial India as a result of the dismantling of millennia-old socio-environmental structures, was emphasised.