Brazil’s forest laws have typically been understood as a scientific response to the ecological destruction wrought by plantation agriculture. “Reproducing the Forest: Science, Agriculture, and Environmental Justice in Rural Rio de Janeiro” shows that they were also a liberal innovation in the face of a labor crisis produced by the abolition of slavery (1888), and a novel means of appropriating the social reproduction of freedpersons who supplied essential work and technological innovations to plantations. By framing freedpersons’ livelihoods as something “stolen” from the environment, environmental policies normalized wage work, sharecropping, and other forms of labor extraction, while simultaneously annexing social aspects of reproduction, including environments and forms of environmental knowledge that sustained commercial agriculture. This dissertation uses multiple methods from the social and environmental sciences to explore how agro-ecologies produced by sharecroppers on a former coffee plantation, converted into a pioneering model farm in the central Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro, became scientifically construed as “forests.” Employing soil samples, botanical surveys, archival research and oral histories, “Reproducing the Forest” demonstrates how diverse ways of knowing about these ostensibly natural environments imply different social histories, and different possible futures, for Brazil’s rural geographies. Recovering the social history of places presently legislated as forests can inform the larger political changes necessary to bring Brazil’s environmental laws in line with constitutional commitments to effect reparations for racialized dispossession and environmental injustice.