The coat of arms of more than 5,000 cities in Brazil can be "read" as a chronicle of Brazilians' relationship with the country's natural environments, suggests a new study. The bad news is that, to a large extent, this relationship is portrayed with predatory undertones: the vast majority of municipal symbols highlight lucrative crops, natural resource extraction, and livestock, while native species are rarely exalted.
The analysis, which mapped the elements that compose 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 involved colleagues from USP, UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina), Instituto Juruá (AM), and Instituto Pró-Carnívoros (SP). Bogoni told Folha that the idea for the research began to take shape when he found a mug from the 1970s depicting the coat of arms of his hometown, Ipumirim, in the interior of Santa Catarina.
To map the "historical ecology" of the country based on the coats of arms, the team counted 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.
The analysis of this multitude of data showed that, in a sense, the 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 of the Brazilian native fauna, on the other hand, account for only 5.3% of the symbols of the coats of arms (invertebrates are present in only 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 ones, such as jaguars and tapirs, in many cases only show up on the coat of arms of municipalities created when these animals had already been extinct in their territory.