INTRODUCTION

The theoretical proposition of this work is to examine how the different degrees of environmental degradation, coupled with economic development, present in Brazil and the United States today, basically result from the different strategies adopted by each country regarding the occupation of their territories through the disposal of their public lands. In order to proceed with the comparison, some common ground needs to be established.

One of the first aspects to point out is the similarity in terms of time: before their separate colonization processes began, Brazil and the United States were no more than two vast lands, replete with natural resources. Moreover, although not environmentally friendly according to today's patterns, the practices of the indigenous peoples that originally inhabited the two lands did not exert a significant impact on their ecosystems. In both cases, it was only the arrival of the Europeans that led to significant changes in the environment.

By contrast, it is incontestable that once the first generation of settlers had established themselves in each country, their future independence would be a historical inevitability, as indeed has been the case for every other land subjected to the global colonisation process that started at the end of the fifteenth century. This perspective helps to demonstrate that, at least at one remote point in time, the two countries were perfectly equivalent, that is, to use a modern concept, they were just two developing nations, both in the institutional and in the economic sense.