E360 FILM CONTEST
In “Here There Was Cerrado” — the Second-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Natascha Otoya shows how industrial farms are plowing up the Brazilian savanna, changing the flow of water, and skewing human memory of the landscape.
In 2025, environmental historian Natascha Otoya traveled for a week through Brazil’s Cerrado region, pedaling more than 200 miles through western Bahia and Tocantins. Originally spanning close to 800,000 square miles, the Cerrado is the most biodiverse savanna on the planet and Brazil’s second largest biome. But in the last 40 years, more than half of the Cerrado has been converted to cattle pastures and to monocultures of corn and soybeans, most of which will be exported for animal feed.
Otoya’s expedition, part of her postdoctoral research at the Universidade Evangélica de Goiás Environmental History Laboratory of the Cerrado, focused on the collection of data and on empirical experience. The slower pace of the bicycle, she said, “opens space for interactions with local people, which can unearth stories, leads, details, and perspectives that might otherwise have been missed.”
Filming as she pedaled along endless fields of row crops sustained by center-pivot irrigation, she reached the edge of the agrarian plateau to gaze down upon an intact part of the Cerrado — a thriving and complex mosaic of grasslands, wooded savannas, and gallery forests that support a vast array of plant species, mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles.
Otoya made the film to raise awareness of the Cerrado and how it is changing. “I believe environmental advocacy and public policy should be informed by the work of environmental historians,” she said, noting that documentary films can be more accessible to the public than more scholarly works.
About the Filmmaker: Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya is an environmental historian whose work explores the intersection of geology, ecology, and human energy pursuits. Her scholarship has been published in leading journals, such as Environmental Humanities, and has been supported by multiple grants, including from the American Society for Environmental History, the Medical Humanities program at Georgetown University, and the Brazilian Ministry of Education.
About the Contest: Now in its 13th season, the Yale Environment 360 Film Contest honors the year’s best environmental documentary shorts from around the world. This year we received 596 submissions from more than 80 countries across six continents, with the winners selected by the editors of Yale Environment 360.