In the News

Heroes of the Environment 2009

Marcio Santilli is the director of Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) in Brazil. Established in 1994 with Ford Foundation support, ISA works to strengthen the environment and advance indigenous peoples' rights to land and natural resources. Our recent grant enabled ISA to participate in the creation of a new federal government land institution to resolve land disputes in the Amazon and benefit poverty-stricken communities. These efforts advance key goals of the foundation's sustainable development work—reducing global poverty, promoting rural climate change policies that benefit the poor, and sustaining the quality of our environment.

Published in Time: October 5, 2009
By Andrew Downie / Brasilia

Negotiations over how to deal with climate change have long been complicated by differences between the rich north and the poor south... Enter Marcio Santilli, philosophy graduate, longtime indigenous-rights activist and, when first elected in 1982, Brazil's second youngest ever Congressman. Santilli, 53, has spent much of his life shuttling between the Amazon and Brasília, the capital, and knows the needs of both forest peoples and politicians. Why, he asked in 2003, can't poor countries be rewarded for reducing their rates of deforestation?

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