Posted on 02/21/2005 9:24:39 PM PST by Coleus
Cabinet ministers and police officers arrived in the eastern Amazon region of Brazil yesterday to investigate the fatal shooting of a missionary nun compared to the 1988 murder of the rainforest activist Chico Mendes. Dorothy Stang, 74, a sister in the Order of Notre Dame de Namur and defender of the rainforest and local people persecuted by illegal loggers and landowners, was shot three times on Saturday near Anapu, a rural town about 1,300 miles north of Sao Paulo.
She had defied frequent threats to her life, and recently met the minister for human rights, Nilmario Miranda, to report that four peasants had received death threats from loggers and ranchers.
Human rights groups compared her death to the murder of Mendes, a rubber tapper who attracted international attention to the plight of the Amazon rainforest.
Paulo Adario, head of Green peace's Amazon programme, said: "Dorothy died fighting for the Amazon, just like Chico died. And other people will die if the government doesn't act."
Mr Miranda and the environment minister, Marina Silva, met police investigators, local legislators and the Land Reform Institute to discuss ways to halt the land conflicts.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, ordered the investigation.
The police had identified two hired killers as suspects, Mr Miranda said. Mr Silva, told Television Nacional: "It was an attempt to intimidate the federal government, to make it stop protecting the Amazon communities."
Sister Stang had worked in the Anapu region for more than 20 years. Born in Ohio, she was a naturalised Brazilian citizen and an outspoken critic of loggers and landowners taking control of land, often by means of false deed, to clear large tracts for timber and grazing.
"She was the personification of a crusade to preserve the rainforest and secure the local land for the people who really deserved it," said the Rev Robson Lopes, who had worked with her.
He said she had been murdered on a settlement which the government was reported to have granted to peasants but which loggers coveted.
As much as a fifth of the 1.6m sq miles of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed, according to experts.
It's just too bad many nuns and brothers don't have the same passion for the unborn.
Why is it they never call a rainforest by it's real name? A jungle.
So, it was bad for loggers to use the land and not the indigenous farmers who used slash and burn farming techniques.
How important is this jungle to our weather systems? I've heard that this tropical jungle has effects on weather all over the world. I don't see too much on the FR about it.
You mean Gaia didn't protect her? Dang. Guess Mother Nature took the day off.
I am trying to think back. Three years ago, I went on a journalist trip to the jungle (aka politically correct "rain forest") compliments of DaimlerChrysler. It is possible that I met this woman at a reception and sat next to her at dinner. Who is the nun next to whom I sat. I don't know if I still have my notes from that trip.
This isn't America. They treat the farm workers like crap there. They'll push tribes off their land, even kill them if need be. This has nothing to do with wacko environmentalism. It has to with tribal rights and big government not pushng them off their land. You know... the same things people talk about here, eminent domain.
Illegal logging due to population pressures is a scourge, with rather horrific long term effects, primarily related to soil erosion and degradation and salinization, and just blowing away. Deal with it.
Having studied the three major tropical rainforests avocationally over a course of years, I've learned that chopping rainforest to yield farmland results in land arable for about three years. Because the soil is so sandy and shallow, that's about all it will support. That also accounts for the lateral extent of tropical trees' root systems (they grow outward, not down).
In contrast to three years of viable farming, once the forest is gone it will take anywhere from 120 to 500 years for it to regnerate.
Countries fortunate enough to have this rich, green treasure lack the education and research muscle to fully exploit it without destroying it. Instead, they willingly sell their treasure for a bowl of pottage.
Saving the rainforest does NOT mean we need to kill the unborn. Defending the former is a matter of good stewardship of Creation, and the latter of the duty of Christians to protect the innocent.
You're a very sick person to make light of the murder of someone. Every time a post like yours appears it just steers people away from this otherwise excellent website. Grow up.
I just looked at a picture of her. I think this is the nun whom I sat next to at the reception. She was fighting the dam.
Shouldn't she have been running a hospital, or a school, or an orphanage or something?
Granted, it's wrong to murder people and it's seriously bad form to murder a nun but what religious order considers its christian duty to be defending trees?
L
Right on!
I can't understand 'Christians' who think we have a God-given to despoil and wreck the Creation that they think He set up n such perfect balance. This unholy man vs nature attitude reached its dumb apogee in Mao's China when he called for all the sparrows to be killed - result, lots of dead birds and then hey, wow, a plague of pests on the farmlands due to...uh, no sparrows left to eat them. Messing around with seemingly 'meaningless' parts of the whole does not always make sense.
I guess she felt that she had a calling to the poor and the dam was going to destroy their way of life. Come on, Lurker, that was pretty cold comment about her.
Do I have to rejoice in the murder of a nun in order to be considered conservative? What the hell? Sheesh.
last comment was obviously not directed at anything YOU said...
She was defending the people, not just the rainforest. Very brave and honorable woman.
Shouldn't she have been running a hospital, or a school, or an orphanage or something?
God will probably ask the same of me and you. Lemme know if you come up with a decent response :)
The two are different. A jungle has very dense vegetation at the ground floor (you need a machete to cut through it). A rain forest has big, big trees, with a dense canopy of leaves high up. But on the ground, vegetation is sparse (because of the canopy), so walking around is easy.
Okay. I actually preferred the two days we spent in Rio.
I'm also pretty busy trying to raise a civilized human male by providing him with a positive role model, a two parent family, and by keeping him away from the trash elements of our society.
If that answer ain't good enough for God, then f*** Him.
L
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