Brazil: In memory of Chico Mendes, his memorials and his murder
His murder placed the State of Acre at the center of world attention
and Andrew Revkin’s book, The Burning Season spread the story.
Two years ago the Chico Mendes story was enshrined as a national
legend through a 55-episode TV soap opera called “Amazônia: From
Galvez to Chico Mendes” which I had the unique experience of watching
from a Santo Daime community in Capixaba, not far from the Mendes home
of Xapuri. Before his death, Chico Mendes had organized the rubber
tappers of Acre into a popular front called the Peoples of the Forest
Movement that successfully reached out to international organizations
for support and began the long process of changing forever the
environmental politics of Brazil.
Today, Chico Mendes is not only
memorialized through monuments, local parks, street names, posters,
and T-shirts. Perhaps his greatest legacy is the sustainability
movement of green government and large landscape eco-planning that has
generated extractive reserves, National Parks, protected tribal lands,
and multi-use zoning. Throughout the first term of Brazil’s President
Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, the internationally famous Chico Mendes
disciple Marina Silva was the Federal Minister of Environment.
Innovative policies were advanced and today Brazil has some of the
most ambitious environmental legislation in the world. But the map is
not the territory. On the big issues like dams and roads, idealism has
been generally trumped by the forces of development and, on smaller
questions of implementing the goals and targets of ecologically
sensitive land management, the politics of county elections often
introduce “adjustments”. I got my first real dose of where things
might be headed when I attended Expo Acre and witnessed “Country
America” in Brazil. It’s clearly a different world from the days of
Chico Mendes. Mangabeira Unger — Minister of Strategic Planning and
coordinator of Amazon development – observes that the question is no
longer whether or not Amazônia will be developed but whether the
development will occur in a chaotic or orderly fashion. President Lula
states the politics in simple language, “The 20 million people of
Amazônia want TVs and refrigerators too.” And the newly appointed
Minister of Environment Carlos Minc points out that it is much easier
to close an illegal sawmill than to replace the jobs that it had
created. In a world hungry for food and biofuels, Brazil is destined
to be one of the greatest suppliers of biological energy. There are
vast land areas that can be converted to agricultural production and a
national infrastructure is being built to deliver commodities from the
interior to the global market place. The big question is whether the
new crop fields and pasture lands will trigger more deforestation or
if they can be based on reclaiming and renewing degraded lands
abandoned after earlier ravages. Unfortunately, burning and
deforestation have been moving back toward dangerous levels.
http://lougold.blogspot.com/2008/12/chico-mendes-capixaba-and-change-this.html
Posted via email from Deane’s posterous