In the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil, also known as “sertão,” pastoralism has been an mode of production since the time of occupation by European pioneers and settlers. The objective of this paper is to understand how the ancestry and memory of the “pastoralism sertanejo” imply regimes of knowledge on landscape transformation in the present: prolonged and severe droughts, desertification, deforestation, urbanization, construction of dams and hydroelectric plants, enclosures of lands (formerly in common use), pollution, transposition and flow of rivers and streams, and so on. Such forms of anthropic action, although they contribute to the deterioration of the native forests (the Caatinga biome), they create “pastoral memories” with which herders (“criadores”) and cowboys (“vaqueiros”) narrate, imagine, signify and preserve the universe of their ancestral practices with livestock (cattle, goats and sheep), plants and the environment. Based on discursive and mnemonic regimes of particular ways of living, inhabiting, knowing, and perceiving the pastoral world, the theoretical contributions of this paper is to enquire the oppositions pre-established by Western thought between past and present, tradition and modern, duration and change, myth and history, nature and society. To this end, the co-creation of landscapes and memories among “criadores” and “vaqueiros” - with whom I’ve been carrying out fieldwork since 2016, in the semiarid State of Pernambuco - will be analyzed through the conceptual repertoire of anthropology, but also seeking to establish dialogue with multispecies studies, ecology and geography. Attention will also be paid to the effects of pastoralism on my position as an ethnographer, since landscapes and memories in permanent processes of change in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil have affected my own landscapes and ethnographic memories, especially in the contemporary context of planetary ecological crisis.