New & Noteworthy

...Other factors considered include the impact of Brazilian federalism, informality in politics, and the multiple levels of en­vironmental activism—state and non­state actors, local and national, foreign and domestic...

...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009 reviews New & Noteworthy WALKINg ThE FOREST WITh ChICO MENDES: STRUggLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ThE AMAzON by Gomercindo Rodrigues, edited and translated by Linda Robben, University of Texas Press, 2007, 224 pp., $22.95 (paperback) originally published in 2003, go­ mercindo Rodrigues’s memoir of the Brazilian rubber tappers’ struggle and its world-famous leader, Francisco “Chico” Mendes, will be of interest to students of environmental politics and social movements alike...

...Tracing the movement’s develop­ment from 1972 to 1992, they identify three waves of Brazilian environmen­talism, which evolved and adapted to the varying circumstances of military dictatorship, democratization, and glo­balization...

...Hochstetler and Keck admit this is an “audacious claim for a pair of foreign­ers” but stand by it, emphasizing the domestic roots of Brazil’s Amazonian and urban anti-pollution activism...

...gREENINg BRAzIL: ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM IN STATE AND SOCIETy by Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret E. Keck, Duke University Press, 2007, 283 pp., $23.95 (paperback) this study of brazil’s environmental movement, based on research begun in 1989, proposes to “tell the ‘inside’ story of Brazilian environmental politics...

...This book will be of particular interest to readers interested in social move­ment theory as well as Brazilianists...

...If not for the empates,” Rodrigues notes, “there certainly would be no more for­est where the [more than 2 million­acre] Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve . . . is today...

...The answer, according to this study, lies in how the movement’s efforts have been constrained and facil­itated by the broader national political environment...

...How should the MST’s suc­cesses and failures, and by extension, those of other social movements, best be explained...

...The empate, the rubber tappers’ signature form of protest, highlights this: A con­tingent of them, including their families and children, would peacefully occupy a clear-cut and talk to the loggers, of­ten former rubber tappers themselves, and convince them to stop working...

...The author, formerly an adviser (assessor) to the rubber tappers’ union, opens his mem­oir, now available in English transla­tion, with a vivid account of Mendes’s assassination in 1988 by gunmen hired by ranchers in Xapuri, a small town in Acre, the county’s westernmost state, where Mendes lived and worked...

...As the more than serviceable in­troduction by Biorn Maybury-Lewis argues, Mendes’s lifework as both an organizer in the rural union movement and as a defender of the Amazon can­not be neatly compartmentalized...

...His study “strikes a strong blow for political opportunity theory,” though not without qualifications, like the “subjective factor” (two highly pub­licized rural massacres helped tip the balance of public opinion in the MST’s favor) and the movement’s own effect on the political context (the massacres wouldn’t have happened in the first place had it not been for the seem­ing threat posed to landowners by the movement’s militant land occupations...

...Contesting what they call the “trans­national narrative”—in which environ­mentalism supposedly arrived in a ra­bidly pro-developmentalist Brazil in the 1980s as a result of international uproar over Amazonian deforestation—the authors point out that like elsewhere, the “new environmentalism” was pres­ent in Brazil by the 1970s...

...The movement’s “emergence during the [democratic] transition period,” they note, “helped to shape an environmentalism that is more po­liticized and further to the left than one sees elsewhere, what Brazilians call socio-environmentalism...

...LAND, PROTEST, AND POLITICS: ThE LANDLESS MOVEMENT AND ThE STRUggLE FOR AgRARIAN REFORM IN BRAzIL by Gabriel Ondetti, Penn State Press, 2008, 281 pp., $60 (hardcover) the movimento dos trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) organization has seen the fortunes of its campaign for agrarian reform wax and wane...

...Offering an account of the move­ment’s development over time during changing political circumstances, On­detti uses the movement as a case study to test four varieties of social-move­ment theory...

...From the movement’s emergence in late 1970s and early 1980s, to its mete­oric rise in mid-1990s, crisis in the ear­ly 2000s, and resurgence beginning in 2003, its trajectory has been anything but static...

...The story then moves back to 1986, when Rodrigues joined the Rubber Tapper Project, and moves forward, offering a series of memories and vignettes...