Diana Alves

About the author: Diana Alves is a Brazilian journalist specializing in the environment.

International and foreign organizations have long fought to preserve the Amazon rain forest, but now for the first time the Brazilian people are leading their own crusade to save the forest. Brazilian public opinion has switched from supporting the forest trade to fighting against it as a result of the economic disaster of unregulated logging. For example, in 2000, popular protest contributed to the defeat of legislation that would have greatly increased the number of trees that could be legally felled in the Amazon region.

Brazil's ecologists and rural landowners will remember 2000 as the year of confrontation. Both wanted to decide the future of the world's biggest biological reserve. A mass petition, protest demonstration...