The Burning Season; The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good. Linda Lieff and Joyce Weiner (Map on page 311), An. [14], 317, [5] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices (includes the map and a Resource Guide). Signed by the author on the half-title page. No dust jacket present. Cover has some wear and soiling and edges and corners somewhat rubbed. "A well-written and sympathetic biography of the late Chico Mendes, leader of the Acre rubber tappers who was assassinated in Dec. 1988. Uses biographical format successfully to probe the wider economic, social, and political questions of Amazonian development. Excellent for classroom use"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the environment around the North Pole. He is the founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University. He was strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism at National Geographic Society. Through 2017 he was senior reporter for climate change at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica. He was a reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2009. In 2007, he created the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times. The blog moved to the Opinion Pages in 2010 and ran through 2016. From 2010 to 2016 he was also the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. He is also a performing songwriter and was a frequent accompanist of Pete Seeger. In the rain forests of the western Amazon, writes author Andrew Revkin, the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes living in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent. Violent death came to Chico Mendes in the Amazon rain forest on December 22, 1988. A labor and environmental activist, Mendes was targeted by powerful ranchers for organizing resistance to the wholesale burning of the forest. He was a target because he had convinced the government to take back land ranchers had stolen at gunpoint or through graft and then to transform it into extractive reserves, set aside for the sustainable production of rubber, nuts, and other goods harvested from the living forest. This was not just a local land battle on a remote frontier. Mendes had invented a kind of reverse globalization, creating alliances between his grassroots campaign and the global environmental movement. Some 500 similar killings had gone unprosecuted, but this case would be different. Under international pressure, for the first time Brazilian officials were forced to take action.