The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest

"In the rain forests of the western Amazon," writes author Andrew Revkin, "the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes cached in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent."

Violent death came to Chico Mendes in the Amazon rain forest on December 22, 1988. A labor and environmental activist, Mendes was gunned down by powerful ranchers for organizing resistance to the wholesale burning of the forest. He was a target because he had convinced the government to take back land ranchers had stolen at gunpoint or through graft and then to transform it into "extractive reserves," set aside for the sustainable production of rubber, nuts, and other goods harvested from the living forest.

This was not just a local land battle on a remote frontier. Mendes had invented a kind of reverse globalization, creating alliances between his grassroots campaign and the global environmental movement. Some 500 similar killings had gone unprosecuted, but this case would be different. Under international pressure, for the first time Brazilian officials were forced to seek, capture, and try not only an Amazon gunman but the person who ordered the killing.

In this reissue of the environmental classic The Burning Season, with a new introduction by the author, Andrew Revkin artfully interweaves the moving story of Mendes's struggle with the broader natural and human history of the world's largest tropical rain forest. "It became clear," writes Revkin, acclaimed science reporter for The New York Times, "that the murder was a microcosm of the larger crime: the unbridled destruction of the last great reservoir of biological diversity on Earth." In his life and untimely death, Mendes forever altered the course of development in the Amazon, and he has since become a model for environmental campaigners everywhere.

Andrew Revkin is the senior reporter for climate and related issues at ProPublica.org. He joined the prize-winning public-interest newsroom after 21 years of writing for The New York Times, most recently through his Dot Earth blog for the Opinion section, and six years teaching at Pace University. He began writing on climate change in the 1980s and has never stopped. In the mid 2000s, he exposed political suppression of climate findings at NASA and editing of federal climate reportsby political appointees with ties to the petroleum industry. He was the first Times reporter to file stories and photos from the sea ice around the North Pole.

Revkin has won most of the top awards in science journalism, along with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Columbia University's John Chancellor Award for sustained journalistic excellence and an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award. He is widely recognized for fairness and a pursuit of reality in a polarized media environment. This doesn't come without perils. The conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh once suggested Revkin kill himself if he thought population growth was such an important issue.

As the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University from 2010 until 2016, he taught courses in blogging, environmental communication and documentary film. He has written acclaimed and award-winning books on global warming, the changing Arcticand the assault on the Amazon rain forest, as well as three book chapters on science communication. Revkin is among those credited with developing the idea that humans, through growing impacts on Earth's climate and other critical systems, had created a "geological age of our own making," known increasingly as the Anthropocene. As a result, he was a member of the "Anthropocene" Working Group from 2010 to 2016.

Revkin speaks to audiences around the world about the power and limits of emerging media and science in fostering human progress with the fewest regrets. Time Magazine named him one of the top 25 bloggers in 2013 for his work on Dot Earth.

He is also a performing songwriter and performed frequently over 20 years with Pete Seeger. Two films have been based on his work: "Rock Star" (Warner Brothers, 2001) and "The Burning Season" (HBO, 1994). He lives in the Hudson Valley.