Coats of arms of Brazilian cities place little value on nature – 03/11/2024 – Environment

The coats of arms of Brazil’s more than 5,000 cities can be “read” as a chronicle of Brazilians’ relationship with the country’s natural environments, a new study suggests. The bad news is that, to a large extent, this relationship is portrayed with a predatory air: the vast majority of municipal symbols highlight profitable crops, extraction of natural resources and livestock, while native species are rarely celebrated.

The analysis, which mapped the elements that make up the coats of arms of 5,197 Brazilian municipalities (93.3% of the total), was published in an article in the specialized journal Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências. The work was coordinated by Juliano André Bogoni, from the State University of Mato Grosso, and included the participation of colleagues from USP, UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina), Instituto Juruá (AM) and Instituto Pró-Carnívoros ( SP).

Bogoni told Sheet that the idea for the research began to emerge when he found a mug from the 1970s depicting the coat of arms of his hometown, Ipumirim, in the interior of Santa Catarina.

“Of course, I already knew the drawing, but I looked more carefully and I was thinking about the date of emancipation of the municipality, 1963, and the elements portrayed, such as agriculture, araucaria and logging”, he says.

“The question arose as to whether this pattern was repeated in space and time, according to the history of the local economy during the main political periods in Brazil.”

At the time, the researcher was doing his post-doctoral research at USP in Piracicaba and began consulting some coats of arms, such as the one in the city where he was located, which alludes to piracema (migration of fish upriver in Brazilian river basins).

In the end, Bogoni and his colleagues mapped almost all the municipalities in the country (only those that did not make their coat of arms available on the internet or those that had such poor resolution that it was not possible to individually analyze their graphic elements were left out).

The team took into account the biomes in which the municipal units are located (Atlantic forest, cerrado, Amazon, etc.) and the moment in which they were formally created, from Brazil-Colony to the New Republic after the end of the military dictatorship, in the 1980s.

This historical dynamic obviously influences the presence of municipalities in each biome. In the Atlantic Forest region, for example, there are 2,775 municipalities, much more than the sum of them in the Pampas, the Cerrado and the Amazon region, since the Brazilian coast was the first to be incorporated by colonization into the Portuguese colonial empire from the 16th century.

To map the country’s “historical ecology” based on the coats of arms, the team accounted for the presence of different categories of elements in them: native fauna, flora, use of natural resources, agricultural practices, types of crops, types of livestock, landscapes (rivers , lagoons, etc.), allusions to indigenous and African culture and types of fishing, among others.

Analysis of this multitude of data has shown that, in a sense, coats of arms are strangely monothematic. Almost half of the symbols present in them (48.6%) are representations linked to agriculture, for example. After that comes the extraction of natural resources (30.5%) and livestock farming (30.5%).

Vertebrates from the native Brazilian fauna, on the other hand, account for just 5.3% of the symbols on the coats of arms (invertebrates are in just 0.4% of cases).

In general, each species of native animal only appears once in the database, and the great irony is that the most common, such as jaguars and tapirs, in many cases only appear on the coat of arms of municipalities created when these animals had already been extinct in its territory.

The same happens in several cases of coats of arms that depict non-European cultures (only 2.1% of the total symbols) — in several municipalities, the symbology was made official when the indigenous people of the region depicted in them no longer existed, for example.

“Although Brazil is probably the most species-rich country on the planet, generations of political leaders have decided not to celebrate this biodiversity, prioritizing, instead, symbology with icons of conquering borders and key natural resources”, write the authors of the study.