Twenty years ago today, an Brazilian rubber tapper named Chico Mendes was shot and killed in front of his family. He was 44 at the time.
I mention this because I spent a bit of time over the weekend watching some sports and listening to the announcers talk about on-field bravery and it reminded me of how skewed our perspective becomes when courage becomes something that usually takes place in a ballpark.
Mendes had fought long and hard to stop the burning and logging of the Amazon. Cattle ranchers wanted the rainforest to themselves and to stave them off Mendes joined a bunch of other rubber tappers to march logging trails, disarm guards, and attempt to convince anyone and everyone who would listen that there had to be a better way.
The better way that Mendes had in mind was to create forest preserves managed by traditional communities and paid for by the harvest of sustainable goods such as rubber and Brazil nuts.
To this end, he helped organize the first national union of rubber tappers, holding a 1985 meeting in the capital city of Brasilia that was attended by a plethora of folks who had never before been out of the forest.
By the time he was killed in 1988, Mendes' work had caught the attention of the international environmental community (he was flown to DC and met with both Environmental Defense and the WWF) and turned the Amazonian plight into a world concern. His murder was considered enough of a loss that the "New York Times" made it front page news.
So while the Celtics have won eighteen games straight and the Patriots might be going back to the post-season, the Brazilian rainforest lost 4,600 square miles last year.
Mendes once said, "At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity."
Meanwhile, Eli Manning, after leading his team to a comeback victory and securing top seed in the playoffs, was asked after the game what he said to rally his team. His answer: "I told the guys, ‘we have a great opportunity, let's just go out there and have fun.'"
But, somehow, we still think of football as a man's game and environmental activism as something tree-huggers do on the weekend.
