Chico Mendes

Mendes tapped rubber trees in Acre and learned to read at eighteen. He organised the tappers into standing unarmed in front of the chainsaws — the "empate" — and argued that the forest was worth more standing than felled, to the people who lived in it.

He was shot at his own back door six days after his forty-fourth birthday, by a rancher whose land clearance he had blocked. The extractive reserves he proposed now cover tens of thousands of square kilometres.