The World Is Burning

When union leader Francisco "Chico" Mend es

was gunned down in the remote Amazonian state

of Acre late in 1988, it seemed like just another

murder in the backlands of Brazil, a vast region

dominated by the world s last great primeval

wilderness. But Mendes s death provoked

international outrage in a Western world barely

beginning to come to terms with the effects of

slash-and-burn policies in AmazSnia on global

warming: the so-called greenhouse effect. A

self-taught environmentalist and spokesman for the

region s rubber tappers, Mendes became a symbol

of the struggle to save a fragile ecosystem whose

teeming plant and animal life are threatened by

ever-encroaching development.

Alex Shoumatoff, "a genuine citizen of the

world, among the very best in nature writers of our

time" (in the words of Timothy Ferris), has been

exploring the rain forests of South America and

Africa for the past fifteenyears. In this richly

textured, highly evocative account, he weaves a

story of violence and raw, brutal politics against a

backdrop of natural grandeur and a forest people s

vanishing way of life.

A tale as varied and surreal as the elements

of the forest itself. The World Is Burnin,~ begins

with a history of the Amazon rubber trade and of

the tappers struggle to free themselves from the

near-slavery of debt peonage, Shoumatoff then

details the life of Mendes: how he was taught to read

and indoctrinated by a fugitive revolutionary in the

forest, and how he organized human blockades

against the chain-saw crews of ranchers and land

speculators. The folly, corruption, and greed

behind development schemes in AmazSnia are fully

chronicled, as is the sudden acceleration of concern

about the world s rain forests. Each of the story s

strands operates in a unique time zone in the wild

m~lange that is Brazil.

As Shoumatoff investigates the murder,

he encounters a Chinatown-like labyrinth. Who,

exactly, did kill Chico Mendes? A local rancher