Word: amazons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...United Nations and World Bank sponsored the Tropical Forestry Action Plan to sustain forests, but instead the plan spurred further deforestation. When asked by an environmentalist what he meant by sustainable, a World Bank agronomist replied, "Fifty years of timber production." Even the rubber tappers of Brazil's Amazon rain forest, who along with their martyred leader, Chico Mendes, became symbols of the sustainable use of tropical forests, overexploit their ecosystem. Writing in the journal BioScience, John Browder notes that in search of food and sources of cash, these seringueiros can kill off wildlife and cut forests as much...
EVERYONE KNEW THAT CHICO MENDES WAS A marked man -- long before the leader of the Amazon rubber tappers and champion of rain-forest preservation was killed in 1988. Little was done to protect him from hostile ranchers bent on stripping the forests. When his assassins, Darci Alves Pereira and his father % Darly Alves da Silva, were convicted two years later, it was an unprecedented strike for justice that triggered a steady decline in local violence...
Back in Littlehampton, Anita's mother introduced her to another veteran of the trail -- a tall, thin 26-year-old Scotsman who had worked his way around the world (mining in Africa, canoeing in the Amazon, sheep farming in Australia) but really wanted to be a poet. To hear Anita tell it, she was concerned with more down-to-earth matters. "I wanted to have children and needed some sympathetic sperm," she says. "What I didn't anticipate was that I would fall in love with my sperm donor...
...believe in our capacity to organize, not in the government's goodwill," says Valerio Grefa, leader of the Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Similar sentiments have stirred tribes from Mexico to Chile and have even inspired some armed guerrilla movements that make the struggle for Indian rights part of their ideology. After initial anger and confusion, governments have begun to respond. In Peru, Amazonian Indians have reclaimed 5 million acres of traditional lands, using $1.3 million in assistance from Denmark. Colombia's 60 Indian tribes have won title to more than 2.5 million acres...
...Brazil, with 240,000 Indians in a population of 146 million, the government last year set aside 37,450 sq. mi. for 9,500 Yanomami, a fragile Amazon tribe whose way of life had been virtually destroyed by migratory gold miners. In the past 2 1/2 years, Brasilia has created 131 reserves covering 120,000 sq. mi. in 19 states that are home to 100,000 Indians. It is a beginning -- but it does not come close to ending the threat to the tribes, whose lands are frequently invaded by aggressive miners and ranchers and who receive little help from...