The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest - Hardcover

Revkin, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039552394X ISBN 13: 9780395523940

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew Revkin has been reporting on the environment for The New York Times since 1995. His coverage of climate change won the inaugural National Academies Communication Award for print journalism.

He is also the author of The Burning Season and Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast. He lives in New York's Hudson River valley.

From Publishers Weekly:

Mendes was one of 48 rural workers and activists slain during 1988 in the western Brazilian state of Acre. He belonged to a family whose livelihood was based on extracting products from the forest--tapping rubber and gathering Brazil nuts--without harming it. But national policy for the development of the Amazon brought highways, agriculture, ranching and wholesale destruction of the environment. Landowners hired gunmen to expel rubber tappers and kill those who stood in their way. Mendes organized the tappers to preserve the forest. Revkin, science writer for Discover magazine and the Los Angeles Times , presents a richly detailed account of that conflict and Mendes's rise to prominence as an environmentalist. This portrait of lawlessness in Acre makes the American Wild West seem tame--Mendes's murderers still have not been brought to trial--but progress in safeguarding the forest has been made. Since Mendes's death, three sizable reserves, including 18 rubber estates, have become federal property on which large-scale deforestation is banned. Illustrations. Author tour.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 039552394X
• ISBN 13: 9780395523940
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 317