Frederico Freitas's Nationalizing Nature is the first environmental history of Brazil and Argentina's adjacent Iguazu Falls national parks, which together preserve around 240,000 hectares of old-growth forest surrounding one of the world's most iconic waterfalls. The protected forestland is among the last stands of the Atlantic Forest, which has been almost entirely cleared by farmers, loggers, and urban developers; between the 1950s and 1980s, most of the forest surrounding the national parks became farmland and cities. The book's time frame begins with the creation of both national parks in the 1930s and ends in the 1980s, when both parks earned UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.
The book's biggest contributions are to the environmental history literature on conservation and national parks in Latin America and elsewhere, and agriculture is not the book's principal focus. Nevertheless, agricultural historians may find value in reading about the preservation of a large tract of old-growth...