The General in His Labyrinth
Siegel, Lee
THE BURNING SEASON The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest Andrew Revkin Houghton Mifflin, $19.95, 317 pp. THE WORLD IS BURNING Murder in the Rain Forest Alex...
...An environmentalist has been placed in charge of the federal environmental protection agency and the government is taking stern steps to stop indiscriminate deforestation...
...His death ignited worldwide outrage...
...Shoumatoff, with several previous works on Brazil to his credit, peppers his account with stunning insights into "Brazilian-ness," a phenomenon too often ignored by foreigners concerned with the fate of the Amazon...
...During the 1970s and 1980s, land and labor conflicts throughout rural Brazil took hundreds of lives...
...This put him on a collision course with ranchers who stood to suffer financially from his efforts to organize forest dwellers and persuade the government to set aside large tracts of land as extractive reserves...
...His alliance with activists, both in Brazil and abroad, who saw in the deforestation of the Amazon basin an ecological disaster with global repercussions, made him an international figure-which did not, however, protect him from becoming Brazil's first ecological martyr...
...There is a good deal of drama in the life story of Mendes, a genuine up-from-the-ranks hero who went from tapping wild rubber trees to involvement in left-wing politics, and thence to an embrace of environmentalism as a tactic for defending the way of life of trappers, Indians, and others for whom the Amazon's tropical forest is a treasure to be cherished rather than an obstacle to be burned...
...He examines in depth the relationship between Mendes and environmental activists both in Brazil and the United States, and the contribution of international banks to the destruction of the forest by approving loans for the construction of roads in the Amazon basin...
...Revkin conveys them somewhat less fully, which makes The Burning Season an easier read...
...Refugees from the drought-lashed northeast and rural workers from the south who had lost their jobs to machines did not need much encouragement...
...This process also endangers the livelihood of the rubber trappers of the western Amazon...
...Revkin explains more clearly how this apparent turning point has been reached...
...It's different down there...
...They burned and cleared plots of land, planted crops that failed, and then moved on to other plots where they repeated the process...
...But speculators had already begun to grab up property along the new roads, and big corporations took advantage of tax incentives to create large cattle ranches in the region...
...Yet his book exasperates as much as it delights, if not more so...
...Bloody land conflicts inevitably ensued...
...His intelligence and charisma had made him not only a leader of the rubber tappers who live off the rain forest in the western Amazon basin, but also an effective advocate abroad, where he was soliciting help in the struggle to stop the destruction of the forests...
...when Mendes was murdered, there were those who thought that the killer was one of the characters on the most widely viewed program of the day...
...Taking advantage of interest generated by the Mendes tragedy, Andrew Revkin's The Burning Season and Alex Shoumatoff's The World Is Burning focus upon the role of Mendes and the rubber trappers in the fight to save the Amazon rain forest...
...Driving to exploit the natural resources and hydroelectric potential of the Amazon basin (an enterprise in part fueled by concern, bordering on paranoia, that if they fail to act, they will eventually lose the wealth of the Amazon basin to foreigners), they have created interrelated social and ecological problems of mind-boggling proportions...
...Revkin, an environmental journalist, is at his best describing the phenomena that make the Amazon basin one of the natural wonders of the planet, and the devastating effects of deforestation...
...The burning and polluting of the rain forest, the flooding of vast areas as a result of the construction of dams, and the high risk of disease and violent death at the hands of invading colonists threaten to exterminate the remaining tribal Indians in the region...
...Joseph A. Page In a certain sense, the assassination of Chico Mendes on December 22, 1988, was unremarkable...
...His account of the career of Mendes is straightforward and compelling...
...He also devotes excessive attention to peripheral matters, such as the sordid squabble over film rights to the life of Mendes...
...For example, he relates how some Brazilians confuse reality with the televised "soap operas" they avidly watch...
...In order to populate the region, various Brazilian governments launched ambitious road-building programs and colonization schemes...
...His book also suffers from the lack of an index and the capricious misplacement (or omission) of accent marks...
...Shoumatoff does not shrink from snarls and uncertainties, which give his book an unruly air...
...They streamed into the new promised land...
...The migrants also discovered to their dismay that the soil in the Amazon basin is generally ill-suited for agriculture...
...Revkin's weakness stems from his unfa-miliarity with Brazil, its language and psychology...
...He understands that in Brazil "so many things...
...Mendes was yet another victim in a prolonged struggle for social justice...
...Often rambling and disorganized, it tells us more than we need to know about the author's adventures in investigating the story, and at times reads like hastily edited transcriptions from his diary...
...At the same time hordes of gold prospectors were invading the Amazon...
...Shoumatoff provides a needed dose of skepticism, and gives a better sense of how difficult it will be, in light of Brazil's social and economic problems, to achieve a long-term solution in the Amazon basin...
...But the case of Mendes turned out to be special...
...They extracted untold wealth from hills and streams, but also inflicted untold damage by dumping mercury, a deadly environmental contaminant, into the region's waterways...
...Both volumes recognize the complexities of the struggle...
...Yet the story of Mendes is but one part of a larger, more complex canvas, encompassing the single-minded quest of the Brazilian people to achieve the greatness they view as their rightful destiny...
...Recent developments in Brazil suggest some hope that the rain forest will be exploited rationally...
...conspire against the vision of a stable, fixed reality...
...THE WORLD IS BURNING Murder in the Rain Forest Alex Shoumatoff Little, Brown, $19.95, 377 pp...
...The devastation caused by these newcomers and by ranchers seeking to convert rain forest into pasture for cattle threatens to turn the Amazon basin into a wasteland, and has ominous implications for worldwide weather patterns...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
