The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Once again, Mendes heard rumors that he would be killed. He became increasingly cautious, never returning by the same trail when he hiked into the forest. He knew his concern was not misplaced. All around the Amazon and other parts of rural Brazil, the violence against the poor and those trying to help them was reaching a peak. Between January 1985 and June 1987, 458 peasants, rural workers, union presidents, and activist priests and lawyers were killed. The government was fully aware of the spate of murders but did little to stanch the flow of blood. In 1987, the Brazilian ministry of agrarian reform issued a report confirming the organized nature of the killings. It estimated, for example, that 114 of the 298 murders of such victims in 1986 were committed by hired pistoleiros. The murders were contracted by land speculators, mineral companies, ranchers, and real estate firms. According to the report, “The means of violence and coercion traditionally maintained by large landowners is undergoing a rapid and fundamental transformation. We are witnessing in rural violence a gangster-like activity which has replaced traditional forms of coercion.”

  For Mendes, the only haven was the forest where he had come of age; only there could he relax. One of the first places he visited after returning from Washington was Seringal Cachoeira. He spent a long evening telling his aunt Cecilia, his cousin Sebastião, and other relatives about the big cars and odd language of America—and about his meetings with some of the world’s most powerful men. His friends later recalled that they never saw Mendes as happy as he was after that first trip abroad. It was not that the trip had gone to his head—at least not in a material sense. Indeed, he hardly seemed affected by the fancy hotels and marble monuments, and he still disliked “meat from the cow,” preferring armadillo or monkey. His happiness seemed to spring from a perception that the prospects of the rubber tappers’ movement were greatly improved. Despite the renewed attacks from the opposition, he was convinced that the people of the forest were now poised to win their battle.

  The trip also proved that Mendes did in fact have the qualities that Adrian Cowell had believed lay within him. Though he had initially been a little shellshocked in Miami, he had quickly learned how to handle himself with the bankers just as easily as he had learned to handle himself on the rubber trails.

  In the course of a year, Mendes, Cowell, Allegretti, and Schwartzman had become an effective quartet of lobbyists. Indeed, the trip was so successful that Cowell and the others immediately began thinking of where else Mendes should visit. But the rubber tapper still had no real credentials, and posing as a member of the press would not always get him an audience with influential people. The solution, Cowell decided, was an environmental award. Mendes could use it as a legitimate calling card to gain access to the circles of power. It also might bring him some much-needed income so that he could feed his family back home. Cowell wrote nomination letters for two awards: the Global 500 Award, given annually by UNEP to leaders in conservation and environmental action around the world, and the Better World Society Protection of the Environment Medal. The Better World Society was the creation of the media magnate Ted Turner; its mandate was to use television programming to broaden people’s awareness of global problems that threatened life on Earth. With both Robert Lamb at the United Nations and José Lutzenberger of the Gaia Foundation on his side, Mendes came away with both awards.

  In July of 1987, Mendes flew to England to receive the Global 500 Award. He was taken to the working-class city of Birmingham, where Cowell’s network was filming a debate on the development-environment dilemma. The panel included Mostafa K. Tolba, the executive director of UNEP, and in a small ceremony, Tolba presented Mendes with the award.

  Mendes was received warmly in England. His message, emphasized as always with a waving right fist, hit home, even though this mosaic of deforested hills and grimy industrial cities outwardly had little in common with the vast green wilderness of the Amazon. The link was labor. To the English, Mendes was the incarnation of a typical British trade union leader of the 1920s, when the unions were first fighting for power. As Cowell put it, “Chico was the person—there always was somebody—who cemented the brothers together. Chico was the cement. If you’d said he was a rubber tapper that didn’t matter.” The Guardian, the Observer, and other papers were quick to pick up on the story.

  That same month, Senator Kasten began preparing new legislation to promote the preservation of tropical rain forests by debt-for-nature swaps. This new strategy was developed by Thomas Lovejoy, a leading tropical biologist now at the Smithsonian Institution. Lovejoy had long been decrying the destruction of rain forests and the mass extinction of species that accompanied the cutting and burning, but he recognized the inability of indebted nations to deal with the problem. He came up with a surprising solution. Environmental groups should raise funds to purchase some of the international debt of forested Third World nations from banks that were eager to dump the bad loans. Then the indebted nation would “pay back” the debt to the new, environmentalist creditors by issuing bonds in its own currency. The interest from the bonds would finance the purchase of endangered forest tracts or the creation of local environmental projects. Such exchanges would solve two difficult problems at once: they would ease the debt crisis in the Third World and preserve the forests. Lovejoy’s approach was already being tested: earlier that year, conservationists had arranged small swaps with Ecuador, Bolivia, and Costa Rica.

  Also in July, Kasten and Inouye’s subcommittee held hearings on the multilateral banks and learned that Brazil had done little to satisfy the IDB’s demands for environmental reforms on its Amazon road project. After the hearing, Kasten issued a stern threat: the United States would significantly reduce its contribution to the IDB if nothing was done to improve the situation in Rondônia and Acre. The bank responded by passing on the threat, warning Brazil that it would cancel its support for the road unless Brazil complied with the environmental provisions in its contract within sixty days.

  As Brazil began to endure more criticism, so too did Mendes. When he returned to Acre, he was depicted by his political opponents as anti-Brazilian, antiprogress—even a tool of the CIA. Wanderley Viana, a Xapuri town councilman (and soon to be mayor), derided the laurel bestowed on the union leader. On the radio, he said, “That was not a medal. That was a rattle to put on a donkey’s neck.” The awards and international attention thus cut both ways: they gave Mendes greater influence but inflamed the animosity toward him. And as the dry season of 1987 came to an end and the burnings began, the physical threat against Mendes increased. Late one night in August, as he was sleeping at the union hall next to the church in Xapuri, a man tried to clamber up the side of the building and jimmy one of the wooden shutters. He slipped on a loose board and then ran when the noise awakened Mendes and some of the other tappers inside. One of the tappers got a glimpse of the intruder and thought he saw a gun.

  Mendes again traveled abroad. In late September, he flew to New York City to receive the Better World Society award. At a dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Mendes rubbed shoulders with a strange assortment of power brokers, celebrities, politicians, and potentates, among them Ted Turner, Bella Abzug, and Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. That Mendes had now achieved a certain celebrity was clear; other award recipients that night included the United Nations peacekeeping force and Phil Donahue. The next day, Mendes flew down to Washington, where Schwartzman had arranged for another meeting with officials of the IDB. Mendes was joined by Marco Antonio Mendes, a reporter for Gazeta do Acre. Reluctantly, the state government had begun to acknowledge Mendes’s growing power.

  This time, with two awards to his credit and a reporter at his side, Mendes walked in the front door of the bank. He and Marco Antonio met with the environmental management committee. Under pressure from Kasten and environmentalists, the bank was now seriously considering canceling its support for the road project. But that was exactly what Mendes and Schwartzman did not want. If the loan were cut off altogether, Brazil would un
doubtedly seek other sources of funding, such as Japan, and the tappers and environmentalists would lose all their hard-won influence. So Mendes repeated his refrain: “We are not opposed to the road. We just want a road that benefits the seringueiros and other people who live in the forest.”

  Mendes was in Washington just as the World Bank was convening its annual meeting. This event was so important that it was always accompanied by a galaxy of meetings of the smaller multilateral banks as well as meetings of environmental and Indian rights groups eager to lobby for changes. Representatives of twenty-eight such groups from nine nations assembled for a strategy session and issued a report called “Financing Ecological Destruction: The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.” Just two weeks earlier, Adrian Cowell had held a screening of the latest installment in his Decade of Destruction series. Journalists and congressmen watched the segment, “Banking on Disaster,” which featured Chico Mendes prominently. He was squinting in the orange dust clouds out on BR-364, explaining how the road imperiled the people of the forest, as heavy road-building equipment growled by in the background.

  On this trip to Washington, Mendes finally hit the jackpot coveted by all who want to influence policy: he made it into the New York Times, Section A, photograph and all. The article described the latest death threats against this union organizer and the tappers’ proposal for preserving the forest. The story gave Mendes’s case a new legitimacy; it also did more to get him noticed back in Brazil than nearly anything he had accomplished to date.

  When Mendes returned home, he was a changed man. He had begun the year as an obscure rural union leader and failed politician. Now, it was only October, and he was flying back from a foreign country for the third time. The National Council of Rubber Tappers and Mary Allegretti’s institute had received grants from the Ford Foundation, which was eager to foster sustainable development in Brazil. There was the prospect of a small stipend from the Gaia Foundation, which might allow Mendes to move his wife and children back to Xapuri so that he could see them more than once a month. He had been featured in some of the world’s leading newspapers; he had met with bankers and lawyers and political leaders. And, on the long flight across the Atlantic, his newest award, encased in polished tropical wood and velvet, was carefully stashed in his bag. Mendes would later say he felt that the awards were like a shield that would protect him from the dangers in the forest.

  But storm clouds were gathering over the Amazon. And they were not the usual cumulonimbus towers that rise and tumble each day in the moist tropical heat. They were clouds of smoke, millions of tons of combusted trees and insects and lizards and orchids, all oxidized by fire and converted into that basic chemical constituent, carbon, and into the gases of combustion—carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, and more. In what was becoming a mesmerizing, relentless rhythm, the burning season had returned. It was a rhythm not unlike that of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which took a simple Moorish dance theme and built it to a diabolical crescendo that sent ladies screaming for the exits at its Paris premiere.

  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the cycle of the Amazon’s seasons had remained the same—the wet, the dry, the burnings, the wet, the dry, the burnings—but with each repetition the flames had grown more intense. Now a swathe of fire cut across the Amazon from southwest to northeast, an arc big enough to run from Canada to Florida; it was this cataclysmic landscape that greeted Mendes. After the eight-hour intercontinental flight, he boarded one of the Varig 737s that hopscotch their way around the Amazon on all-day, five-stop, four-meal flights. Through most of the dry season, the pilots of such flights could count dozens of smoke plumes rising from the carpet below. But in the burning season of 1987, the individual plumes had coalesced into a choking pall the size of India that wore out engine parts, scorched throats and lungs, and reduced visibility to 200 yards in places, closing airports for weeks at a time.

  After landing in Rio Branco, Mendes quickly walked through the terminal, a favorite hangout of Acre’s ranchers; they would often fly in from their barren tracts, park their private planes, have a beer, and do a little business. He never lingered there. The same men who derided him in the state legislature and threatened him on the street would sit and glare as he walked past.

  Mendes took a cab to the bus station. Clutching the bag holding his award, he stepped onto the bus that would take him home to Xapuri.

  Chapter 12

  Into the Fire

  SOME 990 MILES above the earth, a pair of weather satellites operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration orbit from pole to pole, following paths like string being wound into a ball. Each one, NOAA-9 and NOAA-10, has sensors that gather data from a 1,700-mile-wide strip of the earth’s surface as it sweeps around the planet. The sensors detect not only visible light but also infrared radiation—the heat you feel when you hold your hand over a glowing stove element. When the data are transmitted to a ground station and digested by a computer, they can be converted into a mosaiclike picture of the heat emanating from the earth. The data can be used to distinguish features, such as variations in plant cover, which reflect different patterns of light and heat. The data can also be used to check for fires. Any fire occupying an area larger than a football field shows up as a bright white spot.

  On September 9, 1987—two weeks before Chico Mendes went to New York City—NOAA-9 passed over the Amazon. The resulting image was a lazy crescent of dense white dots on a black background. Without the labels and the superimposed map, it could have passed for one of those grand pictures of the Milky Way. But the dots were fires, not stars: 2,500 dots in the tortured state of Rondônia, and 7,603 in all—7,603 fires burning on that one day.

  The person who had the patience to count them was Alberto Setzer, an environmental scientist for Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Setzer worked at a sprawling complex in São José dos Campos, a city in the heart of Brazil’s version of Silicon Valley, ninety minutes by bus from São Paulo. This area was very much the First World part of Brazil—the part that was the fifth-leading arms merchant in the world, the part that produced advanced jet fighters and personal computers and microelectronics. For two years, Setzer and several colleagues had been monitoring the spreading fires in the Amazon through the electronic eyes of American satellites. They had never seen a day quite like September 9—which turned out to set the record for a single day in the burning season of 1987.

  To make sure there was no mistake, the scientists compared the September 9 image with others taken by different satellite sensors that detected smoke clouds instead of flames. When the two images were superimposed, long, wind-driven plumes of smoke could be seen spreading to the southeast from each bright spot. This was no computer glitch: hundreds of smoke plumes were coalescing into a single massive cloud.

  Once the burning season ended, Setzer created a view graph in which he combined the data for forty-eight days in the heart of the season, from mid-August through October, to produce a cumulative picture of the burning. And a chilling picture it was. In the central corridor of Rondônia, along BR-364, it was no longer possible to pick out individual dots. The entire region was white, graphically showing where the settlers and ranchers were scorching the earth. Mato Grosso and eastern Bolivia looked more as though someone had spilled salt on a piece of black paper: the dots were everywhere, but not as concentrated. The line where BR-364 ran north and then west toward Acre glowed as if illuminated by streetlights—all fires set where squatters had followed the paving crews and cut into the forest to stake their claims along the road. Setzer estimated that 170,000 fires had burned in the Amazon that year. And that was an extremely conservative estimate; the raw data showed 350,000 hot spots.

  Alarmed, Setzer examined data from different years and found that the area burned had almost doubled just since 1985. There was little consolation in the fact that only 40 percent or so of the burning was of newly felled rain forest (60 percent was the regular burning of brush or se
condary forest that was invading existing pasture). This still meant that in 1987, some 48,000 square miles of virgin forest, an area the size of New York State, had gone up in smoke. All in all, the satellite images showed that the Amazon was now disappearing twice as fast as previous studies had estimated.

  Setzer’s work confirmed that an extraordinary acceleration of the cutting and burning had begun in 1975 and skyrocketed exponentially in the 1980s. Translated into a graph, the estimated deforestation rates in the Amazon through the twentieth century produced a slowly ascending curve that, in 1985, suddenly became a soaring, almost vertical line. All of the cutting in the decades before 1975 was estimated at a mere 14,880 square miles. By 1978, the cut area had grown to 47,740 square miles, and by 1980, some 77,500 square miles. By 1988, 370,760 square miles had been transformed from forest to fields—an area more than twice the size of California.

  Before the space institute’s study, no one had been able to provide solid proof that deforestation in the Amazon was out of control. A few researchers had long guessed that the rain forests were in trouble; the first scientific assessment of the issue appeared in 1971 when William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, presented a paper entitled “Development and the Imminent Demise of the Amazon Rain Forest.” In 1975 Robert Goodland and Harold Irwin went into more detail in their book Amazon Jungle: Green Hell to Red Desert? The Brazilian edition of the book was chopped up by military censors and attacked by ranchers, but environmentalists in Brazil fought back, circulating a translation of the expurgated sections. Still, the charges of Goodland, Denevan, and like-minded researchers did not have much impact because no one could back them up with hard data.