The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  This time the victim was Ivair Higino de Almeida, a twenty-six-year-old church monitor, union director, and PT candidate for the town council. He lived on one of the small planned farms along the road to Brasiléia, not far from the Paraná ranch. Ranchers in town later recalled that Oloci and the Mineirinhos had said that they were tired of Higino’s harassing them and that Higino was puxasaco, holding the “sack,” of Chico Mendes—too close to the union president. Higino was also loathed by a competing candidate from the conservative PMDB. At five-thirty on that Saturday morning, Higino left his house to get some milk from a neighbor’s cow for his month-old son. As he passed his father’s farm, a blast from a .12-gauge shotgun shattered one of his arms and knocked him to the ground. A second blast hit him in the torso. He crawled along the road, desperately trying to escape, leaving a trail of blood in the orange dust. Now a revolver rang out, and his body was hit five times. Finally, someone walked up, stood over him, and delivered what Brazilians call the tiro de misericórdia, the shot of mercy.

  Mendes had returned home from his trip. Ironically, his last stop had been a visit to the Ministry of Justice in Brasilia, where he warned federal officials about the volatile situation in Acre. In Xapuri, Mendes joined more than a hundred people who gathered on Saturday afternoon to view Higino’s body, which was set on a table in the church annex, still wearing the shredded, blood-sodden clothing in which he had died. The crowd was angry, and cries for revenge again reverberated under the tin roof of the church. Again Mendes pleaded for restraint, and again the rubber tappers refrained from striking back.

  The Alveses became even more brazen. That night, Darci and three gunmen from the ranch, after hanging around outside the union hall and the church, paraded into the church to view the corpse that most of Xapuri was convinced had been their handiwork. Darci walked up to the body, which was by now surrounded by candles and covered with a white sheet. He said, “Hey, someone pull back the sheet so I can see who this is.” When no one complied, he began to reach for the revolver stuck in his belt but stopped. He and his friends strutted back outside, laughing all the way.

  The tappers’ restraint paid off. The murder of Higino finally got the attention of the federal government. The following Monday, Jáder Barbalho, the Brazilian minister of agrarian reform, was dispatched to Rio Branco in a Lear jet; he was met at the airport by Governor Melo and a crowd of protesters. At a meeting with Chico Mendes and Higino’s widow and parents, Barbalho signed a decree declaring that Seringal Cachoeira, São Luis de Remanso, and two other seringais in Acre would become Brazil’s first extractive reserves. Acknowledging that the decision was motivated by concern about the violence, Melo said, “With the disappropriation of Cachoeira and the advent of extractive reserves, the tension in Xapuri has to diminish.”

  The tragedy of Higino’s death was also mitigated somewhat when, on June 30, the tappers of Xapuri inaugurated a new rubber tappers’ cooperative. This cooperative rose from the ashes of the cooperatives that had been nurtured by Mary Allegretti and Oxfam seven years earlier but that had failed because of inflation and lack of training. This time, the cooperative started out with a capital reserve, detailed plans, educated tappers, and expert advice.

  At last the tappers’ calls for change were being heard, but given the price in blood, the celebratory mood was muted, at best. And the victory was still incomplete: much had to be done before the tappers could be sure that their lands were protected from further destruction. Moreover, Darci, Oloci, the Mineirinhos, and the rest of Darly’s pistoleiros were still prowling the lanes of Xapuri.

  Mendes never walked alone now. His small house had a nest of hammocks slung from every rafter. Along with his wife and children, Mendes’s brothers, Zuza and Assis, were standing guard with three other tappers. The threats continued—and were very real. One reporter who visited Mendes during this time was Malu Maranhão, a seasoned correspondent for Folha de Londrina, a paper from Paraná, the home state of Darly Alves and Mary Allegretti. Maranhão knew about tension, having previously filed stories from Nicaragua, where she had watched as a Sandinista soldier next to her was cut in two by a bazooka round. She later said that the feeling in eastern Acre was the same as it had been in Nicaragua—you never knew where the next shot would come from. Maranhão later recalled one night in particular, when she had stayed in the house of Osmarino Rodrigues in Brasiléia, just before the union elections were held there. At around three o’clock in the morning, three bullets had split the thin siding of his shanty. Maranhão was also a guest at Mendes’s when, late one night, she and the others were roused by a voice hissing at the front door: “Chico, Chico, we need your help.” Ilzamar peered through a crack and saw someone standing with a hand behind his back. As five pairs of heavy feet hit the floorboards, the figure melted into the darkness and vanished.

  At a rally in Rio Branco on July I to commemorate the slaying of Ivair Higino de Almeida, the PT candidates spoke mostly about themselves and focused on the upcoming election. Mendes spoke last. He was irritated that the other speakers were using the demonstration to promote their own interests. In contrast, he waved his fist and said that the tappers must fill the vacuum created by the lack of police protection and justice. “Our struggle has always been peaceful,” he said, but now he was ready to discard his strategy of nonviolence, and he called for the creation of a people’s militia. It was time for the tappers to defend themselves.

  As the burning season of 1988 began, and the fields and felled forests around Acre blossomed in flames and threw brown clouds into the sky, Mendes resumed his hikes from seringal to seringal, bringing more tappers into the union and speaking out about the violence. Gomercindo Rodrigues, the young agronomist who had worked closely with Mendes since 1986, became his shadow. Both men carried revolvers. They marched quietly along the estradas, leading pack animals laden with food and supplies, listening for any change in the rhythm of bird calls and insect trills, a change that might signal the presence of an ambush. At each seringal, Mendes gathered as many people as he could and made a speech. “We’re in immediate danger,” he said. “We’re seeing people killed. The gunmen of the Paraná ranch are terrorizing the whole population of Xapuri to strike at me. There are a dozen names on their lista negra.” This was the black list of people who had a price on their heads; it was said to include Mendes, Raimundo de Barros, Gomercindo Rodrigues, and Osmarino Rodrigues.

  Mendes said that the tappers had to be united so that the death of one person would not kill the momentum of their fight. “After death we’re useless,” he said. “Living people achieve things—corpses, nothing.”

  Chapter 13

  The Dying Season

  IN 1988, AS IN 1987, the best vantage point from which to grasp the immensity of the environmental crisis in the Amazon was outer space. But this time the eyes looking down on the flaming forests were human. On September 29, the space shuttle Discovery was launched from Cape Canaveral, marking the long-awaited resumption of shuttle flights, which had been halted by the explosion of Challenger two and a half years earlier. Circling the earth every ninety minutes at an altitude of 200 miles, Discovery flew with its belly toward outer space and its windows toward the ground, giving the astronauts an unobstructed view of their planet.

  On this flight, like most, the shuttle circled the earth parallel to the equator above the tropics. One of the crew, George “Pinky” Nelson, later recalled that although there were few clouds over the center of South America that first day, he could not see the Amazon basin. He knew where it should have been because the Andes range was clearly visible, a lumpy chain of mountains straggling along the continent’s west coast, with the blue Pacific spreading beyond. But to the east of the mountains, everything was obscured by a dense pall of smoke. Here and there, the thick carpet roiled and bubbled where the core of one of the vast conflagrations hidden by the smoke threw so much heat and water vapor into the atmosphere that it generated a huge thunderstorm.

  Round and round th
e shuttle flew, and as South America slid into the planet’s shadow, the scene below changed, as if someone had turned down the house lights in a theater. Now, with each sweep over the Americas, Nelson could see the Amazon. And it was burning, glowing with fire. Long arcs and ringlets of glimmering light were visible where the advancing brushfires and forest fires were burning brightest. Small twinkling spots, like stars, showed the locations of smaller fires. As the shuttle swept through day and night for five days, the Dantean scene in the Amazon basin did not change.

  Nelson retired after this, his third shuttle flight, and gave lectures across the country before settling into a teaching job at the University of Washington. In his speeches, he often showed the pictures he took of the Amazon smoke on that flight, and he talked about the planet’s atmosphere, “this thin blue ribbon around the earth.” Having risen through it and flown above it, he was now especially attuned to the fragility of the thin veneer of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases that for so long had shielded, warmed, and nurtured life on Earth. From the surface, this gaseous envelope was easy to take for granted, but from space it had all the substance and strength of tissue paper.

  Like those before it, the burning season of 1988 assaulted the atmosphere with a monstrous amount of pollution. The day with the most fires, September 21, broke the record set the previous year as 8,438 pixels in the satellite image flared white. Overall, though, the deforestation estimated for 1988 turned out to be 40 percent less than the peak year of 1987, thanks mostly to those same rains that had flooded Acre. Even so, the issue had developed unstoppable momentum in the press and the public consciousness; more than ever before, eyes were attracted to the advancing flames.

  One reason the Amazon attracted so much interest was that in 1988 it seemed that the whole planet was ablaze. It had all begun with heat—the great, unrelenting blanket of heat that settled over the continental United States, parts of Europe, and central China. As Yellowstone National Park and vast tracts of France’s forests burned like tinder, a drought withered crops across the Northern Hemisphere. In the American Midwest, farmers began making comparisons to the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression.

  The extreme weather patterns revived concerns about the greenhouse effect, the tendency of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases produced by combustion to act as a window for sunlight but a blanket for heat—just as the panes of a greenhouse roof make it possible to grow tomatoes in the dead of winter. The greenhouse effect was first described in 1896, when the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius postulated that the massive amounts of these gases emitted by human industry might disrupt the globe’s naturally stable thermostat. Through the years, no one disputed the basic chemistry and physics of the idea.

  And there were convenient natural experiments elsewhere in the solar system that confirmed the theory. Venus, with an atmosphere that is 96 percent carbon dioxide, has a scorching surface temperature, hot enough to melt lead. Mars, with a thin atmosphere devoid of carbon dioxide, is in a perpetual deep freeze. In between lies Earth, with just the right trace of carbon dioxide and water vapor (which also traps heat) to maintain its mean temperature at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Take away that trace of carbon dioxide—which has hovered at a few hundred parts per million for hundreds of thousands of years—and Earth would have a surface temperature of zero degrees. Increase that trace by even a little, and Earth’s mean temperature would rise significantly.

  Now scientists were becoming convinced that Arrhenius was right. In 1957, instruments that measured carbon dioxide were installed on the slope of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. Year after year, the concentration was inexorably rising. As the world’s industrial output increased fortyfold from World War II to 1988, so too did the output of carbon dioxide. In the 1960s, the new environmental movement concerned itself primarily with pollutants that were overtly noxious—cancer-causing compounds, sulfur dioxide, and the like. But each year, millions of tons of invisible carbon dioxide were being pumped into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants and factories and automobiles. By 1980, the carbon dioxide levels were 25 percent higher than they had been in 1860. Some scientists projected that the concentration would double in only thirty or forty years. By 1988, industry and automobiles were pumping some 16.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

  And that did not include the carbon dioxide from manmade fires, such as those consuming the Amazon. In fact, no one had made a solid estimate of just how much carbon dioxide was being emitted by those fires until 1988, when Alberto Setzer, at Brazil’s space agency, published a new study. His team had found that the Amazon fires of 1987 had added 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This put Brazil in the ranks of the greatest polluters in the world. And the burning of the rain forest was doubly disastrous because trees are one of the planet’s most important “sinks” for carbon dioxide. Through photosynthesis, plants remove enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, break it into its component parts—one carbon and two oxygen atoms—release the oxygen atoms, and lock up the carbon. The carbon then becomes the backbone of compounds such as cellulose, which makes up the mass of a tree. There it can stay for a century or more, until that tree is burned or dies and decays. Because of the Amazon burning, only the United States, the Soviet Union, and China—in descending order—produced more carbon dioxide than Brazil. Without the contribution from the burning forests, Brazil would not even be in the top fifteen polluters.

  Worldwide, the growth in carbon dioxide levels seemed unstoppable. And levels of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs have the honor of being both a potent greenhouse gas and a long-lived destroyer of the ozone layer) were rising even faster than the level of carbon dioxide. Even if the industrialized nations slowed their growth, the emissions of these gases would still increase as developing nations rushed at full tilt to exploit their oil and coal and to develop their industries. China planned to double its coal use in fifteen years. When scientists put doubled carbon dioxide levels into computer models of the atmosphere, the globe’s temperature, simulated in the model, rose as much as nine degrees, enough so that the equable climate that had nurtured human civilization for ten thousand years would be terribly disrupted. Droughts and heat waves would wither crops; the Antarctic ice sheet might collapse and raise sea levels enough to flood Manhattan and Bangladesh and extinguish entire island nations.

  Interest in the ailing atmosphere reached a new peak on June 23, 1988. James Hansen, a climate specialist from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, flew to Washington that day and testified at a congressional hearing that he had calculated with “ninety-nine percent” certainty that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.” His evidence was not tied to the current heat wave; instead, he pointed out that of the first seven years of the 1980s, five had global mean temperatures that were hotter than any other year on record. And 1988 was well on its way to being another record year (as it turned out, 1988 tied for the record). Any one heat wave was a random event, Hansen said, but the odds of so many record warm years occurring so close together were minuscule.

  Hansen’s statements were criticized by many of his peers; they agreed that warming was on the way but thought it premature to conclude that it was happening now. Hansen’s timing was impeccable, however. On the day he testified, thermometers in forty-five American cities topped 100 degrees. (Washington reached a mere 97.) Suddenly, the warming atmosphere was front-page news; both Newsweek and Time ran cover stories on the issue. The environment as a whole became a lead story as rising thermometers and carbon dioxide levels were joined by beaches littered with medical waste, the growing hole in the ozone layer, and massive die-offs of fish and seals in Europe. The broiling, noxious summer of 1988 was the first time that the average person really seemed to look around and wonder just what it was that humanity was doing to the home planet.

  At about the same time th
at Ivair Higino de Almeida was gunned down in Xapuri, Chico Mendes’s friend José Lutzenberger flew up to Toronto to address an international conference on the changing atmosphere and the greenhouse effect. In a dim auditorium, before a painted backdrop of a pretty blue sky, Lutzenberger railed about the unbridled destruction of the tropical forests. It was a perfect example of how humankind had become a pestilence on the living tissue of planet Earth. “Deforestation is far greater even than I’d been estimating,” he said. Quoting Alberto Setzer’s studies, he reeled off a frightening list of numbers describing the decimation of the Amazon, ending with: “This is nothing less than a biological holocaust.” He spoke of Gaia, the conception of the planet as a single living, breathing organism, saying, “We humans, in the context of Gaia, are cells. And now we are cancerous cells. A cancer can go into remission, but this will only happen if we abandon our present exclusive ethic in favor of a Gaia ethic.” In classic Lutzenberger fashion, he concluded with a flourish. “Either we harmonize or we go,” he said, pounding the rostrum. “Gaia will throw us out like pus from a wound.”

  For Chico Mendes, the environmental aspects of the fight to save the Amazon had now become secondary. He saw only the stark human side of the problem as the body count in Xapuri continued to mount. In early September a former rubber tapper, José Ribeiro, got into a fistfight in a bar with Sergio Pereira, one of the Mineirinhos. While walking home past the cemetery late that night, Ribeiro was shot in the mouth and belly; he fell dead on the road. Typically, no investigation followed; there was still a total lack of justice for the region’s disenfranchised poor. Xapuri had no full-time prosecutors, and for a decade the town had had no judge of its own. As a result, the court overflowed with ten years of unfinished cases. No murder case had proceeded to a judgment in more than twenty years.