The vogue of “saving the rainforest” has gone the way of the carrier pigeon. As extinct as the deforestation of the Amazon may be from our daily consciousness – a decade ago it was fashionable to care – many people are still fighting not just to accomplish the goal of saving the rainforest, but offering a livelihood to those who call the Amazon home.

“Environmentalist” conjures for many an image of privileged, private-liberal-arts-college-educated, Birkenstock-wearing, granola-munching tree huggers who left their cocoon of comfort in suburbia to crusade for pandas or clean air or diatoms.

Such stereotypes serve only to perpetuate the convenience of justifying an SUV for those who undertake such intrepid driving adventures as going to the mall and excuse those who live on a budget from paying for energy-saving light bulbs whose initial cost is more than the average incandescent bulbs, despite their significantly longer life.

The convincing environmentalists – the ones with dirty, callused hands and who may not even find Birkenstocks their footwear of choice – continue a quiet, determined struggle not after a utopian life in harmony with the earth, but in an act to retain a global environmental heritage while still providing for the daily needs of people who depend upon the land.

Such a man was Ademir Federicci, and so he died in “the struggle” of the Amazon. The web of rivers weaving from the Andean highlands through a lush equatorial forest for miles to the sea was his home, and he benefited from the government’s scheme to open up settlement in the country’s interior during the 1970s, when his family moved to the Amazon.

Unlike the U.S. government’s 1862 Homestead Act, which disbursed 160 acres of public land to anyone willing to live on it and put part of it into production for five years, the resettlement of Brazil’s interior resulted in an upper echelon of the population to consolidate their power and aggressively deforest and alter the Amazon river basin.

Protesting the logging and ranching barons who left Brazilians landless, Federicci and other populist leaders worked to change logging and ranching practices in the Amazon not only to conserve the environment, but to offer the local small farming population a sustainable way to support their families.

Such activists include members of the Catholic Rural Pastoral Life Commission, who monitor deforestation in a fusion of environmental activism and liberation theology. Consider Chico Mendes, an activist and pioneer for extracting rubber from the rainforest to leave the ecosystem and the local economy intact, who was killed in 1988 because he was a threat to large economic interests.

Current events in Brazil juxtapose the movement of the landless and the conservationists with the political realities and scientific advancements of modern day Brazil. Upcoming elections next year led to some political posturing when Brazilian legislators approved a bill supported by the rural caucus of leaders that would allow landholders to increase the amount of land they deforest, and not require them to replant vegetation along the river.

While the bill has not yet been made law, political analysts predict that the coalition in the legislature that defeated the bill in its earlier form will not have the power to do so again.

At the same time, a new communications system, Sivam, is about to be launched to monitor the Amazon. Sivam integrates aerial monitoring, meteorological measurements, and satellite imagery to provide the most complete picture of the Amazon ever, giving scientists and policy makers a more accurate image of the basin that stretches over a landmass the size of Europe.

However, only the activists propose solutions for the average Brazilians from the interior for improving their daily lives. Ademi Federicci lived with death threats for the last 18 months of his life, and he and his family were awakened by contract killers, entering their home and ending his life. The outpouring of protests at the news of his death speaks to the vital role of activists in the Amazon.

Federicci was one of seven Brazilian environmental activists killed since July at the behest of large economic interests. However, those that remain continue “the struggle,” too well aware of the costs of supporting a cause that affects their daily lives, even if it no longer registers on the world’s conscience.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate in international development studies from Emmetsburg.