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Where does one begin, writing about the Cerrado? For the people of Maranhão, a state in Brazil’s northeast, it is not a landscape but the ground of life itself. No biome is more careful with what it has. You can read this in its plants: their roots first go deep in search of water, and only then do they reach for the sky. The Cerrado is where we begin, and where we return.

350.org team with local community members in Maranhão. Photo: 350 Brasil

Every July and December, during the school holidays, families who had left for the big cities to work and study would make their way home. Most of those homes were in the Cerrado. They came back for what the cities could not give them: healthy food, clean air, silence, family and old friends, rivers, streams and forests, the games of childhood, a youth and innocence they had left behind.

For generations, the rivers carried them. They rise in the chapadas, the Cerrado’s high plateaus, and run down to the bays of São Marcos and São José de Ribamar, on the coast of the state capital, São Luís. The Mearim, the Itapecuru, the Parnaíba, the Munim, the Preguiças: these rivers bound the countryside to the city. Along the way, by water or by road, people gathered native fruits, bacuri, murici, buriti, pequi. There was enough for everyone. That sense of abundance never quite leaves you, even decades on.

But that abundance now belongs to the past. One of the reasons is gas extraction in the Cerrado of Maranhão by the energy company Eneva, which bears down on the traditional and quilombola communities of the Mearim Valley. Eneva may argue that when it took over its gas-fired power project in Santo Antônio dos Lopes, the environmental licensing was already complete. Yet no one told the traditional and quilombola communities what a project like this would mean for them. What would it do to their groundwater and their rivers? To the air, the soil, their crops? To their bodies and their minds? To the forests, the wildlife, their right to the land itself?

Eneva cannot claim ignorance. The company recently gave back gas exploration blocks that overlapped the Krenyê Indigenous land and the Peixes quilombola territory. It knows. And still it holds on to the blocks it bought in Capinzal do Norte, where several quilombola communities live. And still it behaves as though nothing is wrong in the quilombola communities of Lima Campos.

The auction planned for October reveals, once more, a way of doing business that looks past people and nature so long as the profits add up. One of the blocks on offer overlaps quilombola territories in the municipality of Vargem Grande. It also reaches into the Munim River basin, which gives water to towns and villages across eastern Maranhão. And once again, the communities were not asked first, as international law requires.

Activists stand in front of the Presidential palace, telling Brazilian President to end oil exploration in Cerrado. Photo: 350 Brasil

Those who would sell it off have learned the opposite lesson. They reach for the profit first, and leave the people who live on this land to deal with what is left behind.

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