The Burning Season
The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
“In the rain forests of the western Amazon,” writes author Andrew Revkin, “the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes cached in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent.”
Violent death came to Chico Mendes in the Amazon rain forest on December 22, 1988. A labor and environmental activist, Mendes was gunned down by powerful ranchers for organizing resistance to the wholesale burning of the forest. He was a target because he had convinced the government to take back land ranchers had stolen at gunpoint or through graft and then to transform it into “extractive reserves,” set aside for the sustainable production of rubber, nuts, and other goods harvested from the living forest.
This was not just a local land battle on a remote frontier. Mendes had invented a kind of reverse globalization, creating alliances between his grassroots campaign and the global environmental movement. Some 500 similar killings had gone unprosecuted, but this case would be different. Under international pressure, for the first time Brazilian officials were forced to seek, capture, and try not only an Amazon gunman but the person who ordered the killing.
In this reissue of the environmental classic The Burning Season, with a new introduction by the author, Andrew Revkin artfully interweaves the moving story of Mendes’s struggle with the broader natural and human history of the world’s largest tropical rain forest. “It became clear,” writes Revkin, acclaimed science reporter for The New York Times, “that the murder was a microcosm of the larger crime: the unbridled destruction of the last great reservoir of biological diversity on Earth.” In his life and untimely death, Mendes forever altered the course of development in the Amazon, and he has since become a model for environmental campaigners everywhere.
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Mendes was one of 48 rural workers and activists slain during 1988 in the western Brazilian state of Acre. He belonged to a family whose livelihood was based on extracting products from the forest--tapping rubber and gathering Brazil nuts--without harming it. But national policy for the development of the Amazon brought highways, agriculture, ranching and wholesale destruction of the environment. Landowners hired gunmen to expel rubber tappers and kill those who stood in their way. Mendes organized the tappers to preserve the forest. Revkin, science writer for Discover magazine and the Los Angeles Times , presents a richly detailed account of that conflict and Mendes's rise to prominence as an environmentalist. This portrait of lawlessness in Acre makes the American Wild West seem tame--Mendes's murderers still have not been brought to trial--but progress in safeguarding the forest has been made. Since Mendes's death, three sizable reserves, including 18 rubber estates, have become federal property on which large-scale deforestation is banned. Illustrations. Author tour.