{
  "id": 751170,
  "title": "A Bicycle Journey Across Brazil to Find a Vanishing Savanna",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/13/a-bicycle-journey-across-brazil-to-find-a-vanishing-savanna",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-13T08:56:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Yale Environment 360",
    "slug": "yale-environment-360",
    "url": "https://e360.yale.edu/features/2026-film-contest-second-place-cerrado"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In 2025, environmental historian Natascha Otoya embarked on a week-long bicycle journey across Brazil's Cerrado region, covering over 200 miles. The vast Cerrado, originally encompassing nearly 800,000 square miles, is the most biodiverse savanna globally and Brazil's second-largest biome. However, in just four decades, more than half of the Cerrado has been transformed into cattle pastures and monoculture plantations of corn and soybeans, primarily for export as animal feed. Otoya's expedition, part of her postdoctoral research at the Universidade Evangélica de Goiás Environmental History Laboratory, aimed to gather data and gain firsthand experience. She emphasized that the leisurely pace of cycling allowed her to engage with local communities, potentially uncovering valuable insights that might have otherwise been overlooked. As she cycled through expansive fields of row crops, irrigated by center-pivot systems, Otoya reached a preserved section of the Cerrado—a diverse mosaic of grasslands, woodlands, and gallery forests teeming with plant species, mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles. She created a documentary to raise awareness about the Cerrado's changing landscape, emphasizing that environmental advocacy and public policy should be guided by the work of environmental historians. Otoya believes documentary films, like her own, can be more accessible to the public compared to scholarly publications.",
  "summary": "In “Here There Was Cerrado” — the Second-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Natascha Otoya shows how industrial farms are plowing up the Brazilian savanna, changing the flow of water, and skewing human memory of the landscape. Read more on E360 →",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}