Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo de Silva fought against illegal loggers and farmers in the Amazon rainforest, standing up against the practice that destroys thousands of square miles of rainforest per year. They were killed in an ambush near their home in the Brazilian Amazon on 24th May 2011 for denouncing the actions of illegal loggers, actively seeking to put a stop to the practice that could have a colossal and irreversible impact on biodiversity, indigenous people, and climate change.
Ribeiro de Silva and his wife had received numerous death threats throughout their attempts to protect the rainforest, but no police protection was offered.
These are just two people out of hundreds who have been killed in the past few years because they sought to protect their environment from further abuse. An elderly nun, Dorothy Stang, was killed in February 2005 for campaigning to stop violence against peasants in the land disputes in the Amazon. The predatory expansion into the rainforest by big farmers is brutal - they are known to employ slave labour, to illegally exploit natural resources and to falsify claims to land.
The latter activity - and activities like it - is common amongst people illegally farming with $ signs for eyes - they cannot see for the prospect of riches. Indeed, James Ho, chief operation officer for Samling in Malaysia, a company that has dramatically damaged the habitat of the Penan through logging, claims that the nomadic Penan have "no rights to the forest". Malaysian law states that permission of the Penan must be granted to logging companies before action can take place. The Penan have erected blockades time after time in order to prevent forest destruction, but the police have been taking them down again. (To see how Samling try to make amends from a PR stand point, how they become part of the community after polluting the Penan's water supply through their logging see here: http://www.samling.com/eng/responsibility/assistance_case17.htm)
Certainly, it seems that environmental activists have been struggling against those that are supposed to be offering protection, as well struggling against the pig headed brutes that are actively destroying their homes. In the Amazon, these brutes are often known as 'agrobandits'.
Activists work hard against the disastrous changes that these agrobandits are making. The soil in the Amazon is only productive for a short period of time (weed growth is rapid and soil fertility is poor), so a farmer that has destroyed a patch of land must move on to the next patch of forest to slash and burn in order to cultivate crops for the next short period of time. One can only imagine the real impact this is having on biodiversity in the rainforest. "Experts estimate that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation" (www.rain-tree.com).
An argument for such activities is that with a world population that is ever increasing, we need to sustain these lives. With more farming and logging, we will be able to provide more for more people. The fact is that these illegal activities only have limited monetary value and productivity rate. This is not sustainable action, and it decreases the value of each square mile of rainforest. The environmentalist C M. Peters stated in 1989 that there is economic as well as biological incentive in protecting the rainforest: "One hectare in the Peruvian Amazon has been calculated to have a value of $6820 if intact forest is sustainably harvested for fruits, latex, and timber; $1000 if clear-cut for commercial timber (not sustainably harvested); or $148 if used as cattle pasture" (Wikipedia (sorry)). The majority of land that has been cleared has been for cattle pasture.
Brutally and greedily cutting down acre after acre of trees in an area of a size that would make it the ninth largest of nations if it could be classified as such will have a catastrophic effect on our earth's climate. The rainforest is now less able to deal with environmental changes, and other environmental changes are consequently affecting the rainforest more dramatically.
Furthermore, extreme drought is affecting the area - 2005 and 2010 saw nearly 2 million square miles of forest die because of drought. The impact of this is troubling: "In a typical year the Amazon absorbs 1.5 gigatons of CO2; [instead] during 2005[,] 5 gigatons were released and in 2010 8 gigatons were released" (Wikipedia referencing 'Science' magazine).
Brave and persistent people like the da Silvas, Stang, Chico, not to mention the 1000 or so murdered activists during the 1980s (of which only 10 people were brought to court for) and the 125 people in the 3 years since President Luis Inacio Lula de Silva took office deserve so much more by way of positive action. These people willingly risked their lives for a magnificent cause. They could do nothing to stop the drought, they are probably going to have had no impact on the UK's CO2 emissions, or the CO2 emissions of China which seem larger because the UK and the US are outsourcing their greenhouse gas emitting business to them, but they fought damned hard, publicly, to protect the land from thugs who are only making the conditions worse. They did what they could to make a difference.
Why isn't more being done to save this land? Why isn't more being done by the people with money and power to protect it? Does it really require a Tesco clubcard equivalent to insentivise action? This land looks after all of us, and is home to millions of plants, animals, people... As George Monbiot puts it in his article 'Shoot the -- in the Face' (http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/21/shoot-the-in-the-face/) "The great majority of greens are powerfully motivated by a concern for social justice, and recognise that if we don’t defend our life-support systems, humanity will suffer grievously".
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