Page 55 - EarthHeroes

Workers brandishing chainsaws and sticks yelled angrily at the protesters. Undeterred, Marina linked arms with the people to each side of her and their group made a chain around the trees marked to be chopped down. She started to sing a Brazilian folk song and the others joined in, their voices rising above the rumbling of the bulldozers. Ahead of them, the forest clearing was an ugly sight, with bare, cracked earth and tree stumps. Huge logs lay all around – the remains of centuries-old trees. From behind them, birds and monkeys sounded alarm calls as smoke billowed into the sky, its smell sharp on the air. Another clearing was being burned. The leader of the protestors, Chico Mendes, stepped forward and spoke to the loggers. After a heated discussion, they eventually turned and headed towards the road. Marina breathed a sigh of relief. For once, nobody had been hurt.
It was 1977 and 19-year-old student Marina Silva was taking part in an empate, meaning ‘stand off’ in Portuguese, a peaceful protest to protect the trees in
the seringal, the rubber plantations of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Brazil is
the world’s biggest exporter of beef, and ranchers had bought the rubber plantations and were driving the rubber tappers – the workers who collected the rubber – from their homes to make way for more ranches. Homeless families were forced to live in slums, or favelas, in the city. The rainforest was also home to Indigenous peoples – the original inhabitants of the land – and their forest areas were threatened too, although some of these tribes had never even met other humans.
As well as taking people’s homes and livelihoods, deforestation in the Amazon has a huge environmental cost for the whole world. The Amazon rainforest
– also known as Amazonia – is the largest remaining rainforest in the world, roughly half the size of Europe, and spanning several countries in South America. It is often called the lungs of the planet, as its trees absorb much of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and without them climate change would
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