Into The Woods

By Tim Padgett

Three days before Christmas 1988, Brazil was stunned by the news that Chico Mendes, a humble rubber tapper who had become the country's most famous crusader for the protection of the Amazon rain forest, had been murdered by furious Brazilian landowners. Martyrdom can help fulfill a life's mission, and that was true for Mendes: his death electrified a generation of young Brazilians, who found both magic and meaning in his seductive brand of environmentalism.

Sylvia Mitraud, a Sao Paulo university student,was among those seduced. The daughter of a Brazilian economic-planning-ministry bureaucrat, she had been brought up to care more about her Portuguese enunciation than the environment. But Mendes' death taught her that the deadly tension between land and development was costing Brazil its future. "I realized that if we were going to survive, we couldn't continue with unsound environmental development," says Mitraud. Today the 32-year-old is a tireless activist for the World Wildlife Fund. On the road more than half of each month, Mitraud, who is single, shuttles between crusades to repair Brazil's rain forests, its fragile Atlantic archipelagoes or the rapidly disappearing central savannas. A coffee-guzzling eco-evangelist with a pendant shaped like an endangered sea turtle dangling from her neck, Mitraud converts farmers, miners and housewives to viable but more ecologically sustainable livelihoods, such as ecotourism. She has the abrupt professionalism of a Harvard M.B.A. and the urgency of a woman who is sprinting madly against a clock. It is an often joyless existence, as she fights for the hearts and minds of Brazilians who are more interested in earning reals than saving trees. But the wins, when they come, are huge. "There is nothing more rewarding," she says with one of her broad smiles, "than watching someone change their behavior toward the environment."

That theme promises to resonate as loudly as a jungle waterfall in the next century. As the lacerating strains on the planet become bona fide national-security issues--just wait until water scarcity supplants religion as the reason for hate in the Middle East--folks like Mitraud will be staring world leaders in the face more directly than ever.

Among Mitraud's current projects is a $1.2 million W.W.F. plan to preserve the 1.5 million-sq-km area of Brazilian savanna known as the cerrado. (The less than $1-an-acre budget shows how badly outmatched many environmental actions still are.) The cerrado is one of the world's most diverse swaths of nature, a kind of National Geographic theme park where howler monkeys and hyacinth macaws dance and sing from buriti palms and vast treeless grasslands. But in the past 30 years, more than half its original vegetation has been chewed away--and almost 75% will be gone by 2000.

From her field office in the town of Alto Paraiso, 150 miles north of Brasilia, Mitraud bears a message to locals that is a delicate mix of dire warnings and creative alternatives. Unless you take steps now, she says--use natural fertilizers, market the cerrado's evergreen flowers and fruits, or turn county-size chunks of the region into nature parks for tourists--your children will inherit a wasteland. The message seems to be getting through: in and around Alto Paraiso, a fourth of the residents live off enterprises that don't involve trashing the land.

The fight--and it is still a fight--has got easier in the past few years as the government has become more aware of the environment. World leaders, from U.S. Vice President Al Gore to Brazilian Senator Marina Silva, are building constituencies around the green vote. "They know that the remarkable strength the environment has in opinion polls today can only translate into the polling place in the next century," says Duane Silverstein, executive director of the Goldman Foundation in San Francisco, which hands out annual $100,000 prizes to environmentalists. As a result, environmentalism can expect to attract more Mitrauds, with aspirations that flow beyond the local aquifer. "I am," Mitraud admits, "very ambitious." She has no plans to seek political office, only to acquire a Ph.D.

But even Mitraud knows there's a battle ahead and that the real challenge comes in spreading environmental passion to a much larger community. "All I can do is implement the process," says Mitraud, as she hurries to another meeting in Alto Paraiso. "If within five years I don't feel like I can leave here, then we've failed." But Mitraud's evangelism seems to be taking root. Says Irani Avelino Nascimento, an unemployed quartz miner turned park guide: "Before, I abused the environment and got little out of it," he says. "Now I respect it and earn a better wage. It's nice to think that we have a future."

--With reporting by Jack Epstein/Alto Paraiso

With reporting by Jack Epstein/Alto Paraiso