Amazon Leader Ends Her Embittered Era

Brazil's outspoken environment minister, Marina Silva, resigned Tuesday in a move that was widely expected after years of tension with the country's largely pro-development administration.

In her resignation letter to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Silva omitted specific reasons for her departure. She described her decision as "personal and irrevocable," according to media reports.

Days before Silva resigned, Brazil announced its new sustainable development plan for the Amazon. The plan emphasized the country's right to develop its Amazon resources and for the most part failed to address key issues that Silva has advocated, such as incentives for sustainable forestry or sustainable farming. Brazilian media reports suggest Silva was frustrated that the ministry of strategic planning was selected to oversee the development plan, instead of the environment ministry.

The international environmental community has expressed sadness over the news of Silva's resignation. She is widely considered to be the most influential environment minister in Brazilian history. Her departure is said to be a victory for the agricultural and livestock industries, which opposed her efforts to create national anti-deforestation measures in the Amazon and elsewhere.

"She was key in the doubling of the Amazon protected area network, and she will go down in history as one of the most courageous leaders in the fight against corruption and illegal activities in rainforest regions," said Daniel Nepstad, a Brazil-based ecologist with the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. "I am deeply saddened by her resignation."

Similar sentiments are being expressed from Brazilians. "Marina was the best minister that we had," said Paulo Moutinho, scientific coordinator of the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM). "Her conviction about the necessity to establish sustainable development in Brazil is unswerving."

Silva retains a position as senator in Brazil's legislature, where she may have greater freedom to criticize the Lula government.

Silva is often considered emblematic of her native home, the Amazon. In the early 1980s, she and fellow rubber-tapper Chico Mendes founded empates, a non-violent grassroots movement against deforestation. Undaunted by Mendes' assassination in 1988 or her many illnesses, including heavy metal contamination, Silva was the first rubber tapper elected to Brazil's federal senate in 1994. When Lula became president in 2002, Silva was one of his first political appointees.

Despite her popularity, Silva has been largely unsuccessful in her political battles with Lula. The president ignored her opposition to two large hydroelectric projects on the Amazon River's largest tributary, the Madeira River. Her efforts to oppose the expansion of BR-163, the so-called "soy highway" that cuts through the Amazon, were to no avail. And after Silva called for a ban against the planting and exportation of genetically modified crops, the ban was later lifted. By allowing the government to relax laws concerning infrastructure licenses, Silva "sets a dangerous precedent," said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth, Amazonia.

Yet Silva's stances have resulted in several important concessions, such as more-stringent hydroelectricity policies and sustainable development zones that buffer the BR-163 corridor. "Her influence has been to keep those issues in the forefront by arguing the case very cogently and with a lot of authority," said Tim Hirsch, a Brazil-based freelance journalist who authored a recent story on Amazon protection in World Watch magazine. "The profile of environmental policies within the Lula administration is higher than it would have otherwise been."

Brazilian society has become cautious of allowing international interests determine how the country should manage its Amazon resources. Yet Silva has often sided in favor of the wider environmental community to advocate forest conservation and greater action to address climate change. 

Her replacement, Carlos Minc, is an environmental advocate from Rio de Janeiro who helped found Brazil's Green Party. He is generally respected within the environmental community, and some are welcoming a minister who is not solely focused on Amazonian issues. "The huge challenge for him is to convince people both inside and outside Brazil that he can have the same influence on policy that Marina Silva did," Hirsch said.

Staff writer Ben Block covers everything environmental with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.