It is vast. It is biodiverse. It is succumbing to the encroachment of Brazilian cattle-ranching and mono-crop agriculture. And it is not the Amazon. Brazil’s Cerrado, a massive, subtropical savanna covering 772,000 square miles (2.039 million sq kms), or 24% of the entire country, often gets ignored on account of world concern for the Amazon rainforest, its higher-profile neighbor. Yet the Cerrado, which extends across 10 states from western Brazil to the country’s northeast, is being eaten away by development driven largely by cattle and soybean operations, just as the Amazon is. And as in the Amazon rainforest, changing land use is taking a heavy environmental toll on the vast biome, which for the most part is sparsely forested, though it includes... [Log in to read more]