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Protector for the Amazon...
Jose Lutzenberger, an ecologically oriented agronomist, is Brazil's most unflinching environmentalist. Lutzenberger aroused the anger of the administration of former President Jose Sarney by daring to declare publicly that the rest of the world had a legitimate interest in the fate of the Amazon rain forest. "If you set your homes on fire, it will threaten the homes of your neighbors," Lutzenberger noted with simple eloquence. Because of his reputation for outspokenness, the international environmental community was dumbfounded in March, when newly inaugurated President Fernando Collor de Mello named Lutzenberger Secretary of the Environment...
Donning army fatigues, Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello boarded an air force SuperPuma helicopter last week and flew over the dense rain forest of Roraima in the northern Amazon. The region is home to the Yanomami, a stone-age tribe threatened with extinction. For the past three years, their federally protected lands have been devastated by gold prospectors, whose search for riches has led to the deaths of an estimated 1,200 Indians from the 9,000-member tribe, largely through disease. Last October a federal court ordered the miners to leave the territory. But hundreds remained, using crude...
Inaugurated three weeks ago, Collor used the trip to signal that he will make environmental reform one of his administration's major goals. But pro- Indian groups contend that Collor must go much further and ban all miners from the Amazon. Says Claudia Andujar, an Indian-rights activist: "The cancer is still in the area. The miners will return and destroy more forests, pollute more rivers and kill more Indians...
...introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he recalls. At Michigan State, McGuane edited a literary journal and shunned the budding hippie drug culture with such conviction that his peers dubbed him the "White Knight...