E360 FILM CONTEST

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.

2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest

In 2025, environmental historian Natascha Otoya traveled for a week through Brazil’s Cerrado region, pedaling more than 200 miles through western Bahia and Tocantins. Originally spanning close to 800,000 square miles, the Cerrado is the most biodiverse savanna on the planet and Brazil’s second largest biome. But in the last 40 years, more than half of the Cerrado has been converted to cattle pastures and to monocultures of corn and soybeans, most of which will be exported for animal feed.

Otoya’s expedition, part of her postdoctoral research at the Universidade Evangélica de Goiás Environmental History Laboratory of the Cerrado, focused on the collection of data and on empirical experience.…