It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been 25 years since a cattle rancher ordered his son to shoot Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and unionist who had become an effective international campaigner for sustainable use of the Amazon rain forest. I spent the year following Mendes’s assassination piecing together “The Burning Season,” my book on his life, death and influence. But I haven’t been back to that corner of the Amazon since the trial of his murderers in 1990. The Guardian has published an excellent article assessing his legacy. Linda Rabben, an anthropologist and activist focused on human rights and the environment, is the lead organizer of a conference on Mendes and grassroots environmentalism next spring. She sent this short “Your Dot” contribution on Mendes:

Chico Mendes, known internationally as an environmental campaigner, is being honored this afternoon in Washington, D.C., with a memorial service on the 25th anniversary of his assassination in Xapuri, Acre, deep in the Amazon rain forest he had fought to conserve.

About six months before his death I went with the American filmmaker Miranda Smith and the Brazilian anthropologist Mary Allegretti to visit Mendes in and around his home town. We walked along the forest paths where he had gathered latex as a boy. We ate lunch and supper at his humble home, where Miranda took this picture, which shows him as a pensive man and a loving father.

But he was also a jokester who loved to play pranks. His comrade, Gomercindo Rodrigues, called Chico “an ordinary man.” Of course he wasn’t. He had a rare vision, of poor rural workers and indigenous people uniting to protect the forests from which they gained their subsistence. This was the vision he died for.

During the last two years of his life Chico became a global figure with the help of international environmentalists. The picture changed, and the vision expanded.

Chico’s killer, a land-grabbing rancher’s son, was convicted. But the people who probably ordered and paid for his murder have never been brought to justice. Impunity still reigns. For a while he was a martyr icon, one of hundreds or even thousands of ordinary people who have died as a result of their nonviolent defense of human rights and the environment. Then many people forgot him. Those who knew and worked with him never forgot, however.

Today he lives on as a model of grassroots activism. All over the world, from Colombia to Burma, local people follow his example as they struggle to protect their sustainable way of life in the face of tremendously powerful forces that seek to steal their resources, drive them off the land, criminalize them and even kill them if they protest.

At least once a month someone like Chico is killed somewhere in the world. I hope that remembering Chico will inspire activists to continue “in spite of everything,” as the Brazilians say.

In April 2014 people who knew or wrote about Chico will meet with grassroots activists, students, scholars, policymakers, journalists and others from around the world at a conference, “Chico Vive: The Legacy of Chico Mendes and the Global Grassroots Environmental Movement,” at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C.

December 15, 2014, would have been his 70th birthday. I like to think that if his assassin had missed, he would still be fighting for the cause of the rubber tappers and other traditional communities on the front lines of sustainability.