In a tiny town in the westernmost corner of Brazil’s vast portion of the Amazon River Basin, a single blast from a 20-gauge shotgun echoed around the world, thirty years ago this Saturday.

The target, fatally struck by 60 lead pellets as he walked out his back door to wash before dinner, was Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, best known as Chico Mendes. Mendes was a rubber-tree tapper and union organizer who’d built a broadening movement to protect Brazil’s rain forests not just for their global ecological and climatic value, but for the sake of the traditional and indigenous communities that lived productively within them.

The danger came from an advancing front of road builders and ranchers, fire and