ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a study of that resource’s depletion and of sugar production’s detrimental effect on Brazil’s Atlantic forest. Fuel’s increasing scarcity increased labor and capital costs related to fuel supply, exacerbated elite social conflict, multiplied petitions to the Crown, and eventually dictated the adoption of more efficient firing technology. The simple process of boiling the water and impurities from sugarcane’s viscid juice, an essential stage in sugar refinement and one requiring large quantities of wood fuel, was in full swing. Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish explorers, the people who initiated the expansion of Europe, came from an environment that had long been stripped of its trees. Residents of wood-rich regions often perceive timber, lumber, and firewood to be as common as oxygen in the air. The Bahian sugar mill, known as the engenho , was simply the combination of apparatus by which planters turned cane into varying qualities of crystallized sugar.
