Against the grain: environmental laws, local botanical knowledge, and housing access in Rio de Janeiro

This article considers how the construction practices of marginalized communities in Rio de Janeiro link the provision of essential housing to distant forest environments and markets for wood building materials. As elsewhere in Brazil, many families without access to real estate markets have built their own homes using locally available materials, a right protected by the 1988 Constitution and federal law. Today, these houses are typically built from reinforced concrete and clay bricks and finished with a roof of clay tile or cheaper fiber-cement corrugate. Production and sale of fiber-cement, which contains asbestos, were restricted by Rio de Janeiro State law in 2001 and ruled unconstitutional by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2017. But little attention has been given to the human and environmental health effects of other building materials. This article examines the timber frame to which roof tiles are affixed. Maçaranduba is the main wood used in roof construction and is the most traded wood in Brazil, with production practices linked to environmental and social violence. Brazil’s laws presently subsidize plantation-grown pine and eucalyptus as “sustainable” alternatives to native hardwoods. The chemical treatments commonly applied to render these woods resistant to decay, however, contain potent environmental toxins. Moreover, the degree to which builders of essential housing actually use these products is unstudied. We argue that legislation has moved “against the grain” or without close attention to the botanical knowledge expressed in vernacular architectures and the needs of marginalized socio-ecologies intimately linked through the production of essential housing.