"Mendes was not an environmentalist in the comfortable sense of the word. He was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade unionist and socialist from Acre, in the Amazon. He fought for the forest not out of some abstract “love for nature”, but he fought for the people whose lives depended on it: rubber tappers, peasants, Indigenous communities, forest workers.
Chico Mendes in Acre, Brazil.
His struggle was not the defense of an untouched nature against society. It was the defense of a form of life against ranchers, landowners, deforestation, and the organized violence of capital. Mendes defended the Amazon by defending those who lived from the forest without destroying it, and he was assassinated in Xapuri in 1988 exactly for this reason.
This is why the slogan still matters. It does not mean that ecology must be reduced to class politics in a narrow sense.
It means that ecology becomes politically serious only when it asks: who owns the land? Who controls production? Who profits from destruction? Who breathes the poisoned air? Who loses their home to floods, drought, fires, mines, pipelines and plantations? Who is asked to change their lifestyle while fossil companies, agribusiness, militaries and logistics empires reorganize the entire planet for their own profit?"
read stack by THE ECOSOCIALIST
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