Evolução histórica da Engenharia Florestal do Brasil na visão de lideranças e entidades associativas de classe

Abstract

Forestry Engineer as an activity in Brazil has existed since Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese, that is, in the 16th century. However, the activity, as a profession, had its first contours in the 19th century, when there was an attempt to form higher-level foresters in accordance with Imperial Decree 5,957, from 1875. Agricultural Engineers, in eventual references in disciplines of the university curriculum. The specific training of professional Forestry Engineers was only addressed in Brazil from 1948 onwards, at the Latin American Conference on Forests and Forest Products, held in TeresópolisRJ, where the creation of the Latin American Institute of Forestry Sciences was recommended by the Subcommittee on FAO Unexplored Forests. At the 1st Brazilian Forestry Congress, held in 1953 in Curitiba - PR, several motions for the creation of a School of Forests were presented, suggesting locations, opportunities, needs and justifications, and at the 5th World Forestry Congress, in 1960, Decree 48,247 was presented in which was signed by Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, creating the first Forestry Engineer course in Brazil. The course was implemented in the first semester of the same year in Viçosa. Given this scenario, the present study aimed to record the historical evolution of Forestry Engineer in Brazil in a chronological way, bringing the vision of important actors in Brazilian Forestry Engineer, in addition to bringing a survey of existing courses in the country and mapping them according to distribution by region and by decade of creation. For this, a data survey was initially carried out, that is, the search for existing materials and documents on the internet, such as interviews, reports, reports, various websites, the portal of the Brazilian Society of Forestry Engineers (SBEF), magazines, among other files. Being a job through which he had the possibility to know more deeply about the history of Forestry Engineer in Brazil, going from 0 professionals in the 60s with only one course, to a little more than 15 thousand professionals registered in the Federal Council of Engineer and Agronomy in the year 2023, and 73 courses offered in an active situation. In addition to showing the whole society in general the vision of great leaders who collaborated in some way for the evolution within the Brazilian Forestry Engineer Course, contributing to several future actions that can be mirrored in the stories of the past.