Nature's Allies: Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World by Larry Nielsen

Author:Larry Nielsen [Nielsen, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: nature, Biography & Autobiography, Environmental Conservation & Protection, General, Environmentalists & Naturalists
ISBN: 9781610917957
Google: DjCQDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-02-02T23:41:11.399520+00:00

Figure 5.2 Chico Mendes always considered himself a rubber tapper, and he was at home working a rubber trail. He never lost touch with the trees or the people who made their living sustainably by tapping them. (Photograph by Adrian Cowell, reproduced courtesy of Boojie Cowell.)

Mendes was a thoughtful child. He had learned to read and figure a little from his father, and undoubtedly he had absorbed his father’s distrust of the rubber barons who controlled them. Like his father, he was always interested in politics. Yet he did not stand out in the community. Neighbors at first thought little of him, as one observed: “As a kid, you’d never have thought that Chico could grow into such a man. He used to walk around with his mouth hanging open, and he drooled.”11 All that changed one day when a stranger walked out of the forest into the Mendes’ clearing.

“In 1962,” Mendes remembered, “someone new passed by our house on the rubber estate where we lived. He was a worker, a rubber tapper, but looked and spoke completely differently from the rest.”12 He was a huge man, burly, with a heavy beard and a voice that boomed through the forest. Mendes’s initial reaction was favorable: “This gentleman was very lively, and it was easy to see—even though he was wearing rubber tapper clothes—his way of expressing himself made it obvious that his upbringing was very different.”13

The stranger’s name was Euclides Fernandes Tavora, although he didn’t share that information until he had known Mendes for more than a year. He had been raised in eastern Brazil, where he was a member of the elite classes, university educated, and an officer in the Brazilian army. Twice, however, his communistic leanings had caused him to join the losing side in attempted political takeovers of the Brazilian government, and twice he had been imprisoned. Twice also he escaped, the second time across the border to Bolivia. There he joined in the workers’ struggle against a repressive government; when another arrest seemed imminent, he snuck back across the border and hid in Acre’s dense and remote forests. There he quietly purchased an abandoned rubber estate and learned the basics of rubber tapping.

The way he spoke and the things he said intrigued Mendes, and Tavora seemed to see great possibilities in him. Mendes’s father agreed that Tavora could teach the boy to read better, as long as it didn’t interfere with his work. Starting immediately and continuing for three years, Mendes trekked three hours to Tavora’s seringal on Saturday afternoons and trekked home on Sunday evenings.

They had no books, so Mendes took his reading lessons from the newspapers that Tavora stockpiled. Together they poured over the columns, providing Mendes not only reading practice but also a primer in politics, philosophy, and social doctrine. Mendes admitted, “I was so interested in what he had to say that at times I spent the whole night awake, listening to him.”14

Mendes’s education took a radical turn in 1964, after an uprising brought military rule to Brazil.

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