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Foreword
rubber tapper who stood shoulder to shoulder with Mendes in the confrontations with ranchers. And although Brazil's first working-class president, Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva, was criticized early in his administration by environmental groups inside and outside of Brazil for allowing deforestation rates to climb, his presidency clearly signaled a great transition. Lula once stood trial in military court alongside Chico Mendes for their union activities. Stephan Schwartzman, an anthropologist for the American nonprofit Environmental Defense and one of Mendes's early contacts outside Brazil, says the friction points leading to violence have shifted to where the conflict over land use and development is most intense, the sprawling state of Para, which spreads south of the mouth of the vast Amazon river system. In that region, Mendes's philosophy has been adopted by rural Amazonian communities of small farmers and settlers, including those lured up the spreading road system in the 1960s by offers of free land dangled by the military dictatorship. Some of these farmers, seeing the limits of the old methods of cut, burn, plant, and move on, have embraced new forms of agriculture that can be sustained on fragile Amazonian soils. More than one hundred grassroots groups and unions have formed a coalition-the Movement for the Development of the Transamazon and the Xingu-devoted to advancing education, nondestructive agriculture techniques revolving around treegrown crops, and small-scale development projects, Schwartzman told me recently. The groups have proposed a conservation strategy for the region that could create an intact corridor of different kinds of reserves spanning 62 million acres, he said. Together with existing reserves and Indian lands, this could preserve a swath of ecosystems ranging from the drier savanna to the depths of the still-undisturbed rain forests of the deepest Amazon. The corridor could serve as a shield against development that still spreads apace along the Transamazon Highway, the original spearhead for destruction. The effort has the support of the federal and state governments