When union leader Francisco "Chico" Mend es
was gunned down in the remote Amazonian state
of Acre late in 1988, it seemed like just another
murder in the backlands of Brazil, a vast region
dominated by the world s last great primeval
wilderness. But Mendes s death provoked
international outrage in a Western world barely
beginning to come to terms with the effects of
slash-and-burn policies in AmazSnia on global
warming: the so-called greenhouse effect. A
self-taught environmentalist and spokesman for the
region s rubber tappers, Mendes became a symbol
of the struggle to save a fragile ecosystem whose
teeming plant and animal life are threatened by
ever-encroaching development.
Alex Shoumatoff, "a genuine citizen of the
world, among the very best in nature writers of our
time" (in the words of Timothy Ferris), has been
exploring the rain forests of South America and
Africa for the past fifteenyears. In this richly
textured, highly evocative account, he weaves a
story of violence and raw, brutal politics against a
backdrop of natural grandeur and a forest people s
vanishing way of life.
A tale as varied and surreal as the elements
of the forest itself. The World Is Burnin,~ begins
with a history of the Amazon rubber trade and of
the tappers struggle to free themselves from the
near-slavery of debt peonage, Shoumatoff then
details the life of Mendes: how he was taught to read
and indoctrinated by a fugitive revolutionary in the
forest, and how he organized human blockades
against the chain-saw crews of ranchers and land
speculators. The folly, corruption, and greed
behind development schemes in AmazSnia are fully
chronicled, as is the sudden acceleration of concern
about the world s rain forests. Each of the story s
strands operates in a unique time zone in the wild
m~lange that is Brazil.
As Shoumatoff investigates the murder,
he encounters a Chinatown-like labyrinth. Who,
exactly, did kill Chico Mendes? A local rancher
發表於2024-12-24
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