But Silva resigned in 2008, saying she had "lost the strength to carry on." During her tenure, she clashed repeatedly with other ministers, including Lula's chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff. She found herself on the losing side of a familiar argument about the environment and development. Her replacement, Carlos Minc, is a founder of Brazil's Green Party, but he lacks the credentials of Silva, who grew up in an impoverished Amazon settler family. Minc is from the affluent south side of Rio de Janeiro.

The two ministers also have markedly different attitudes toward the new land bill that passed both houses of Brazil's Congress early this month. Minc initially claimed it will "bring social justice to millions and end violence in the region. It's not a panacea but it's an important step to end this chaos." Silva, meanwhile, has warned that it could provoke a new wave of land-grabbing and deforestation.

Both have united, however, to oppose last-minute amendments inserted by the bancada ruralista, an informal block of parliamentarians who defend the interests of ranchers and large-scale farmers. Their amendment would enable companies to benefit from the new land-rights measures by claiming territory previously occupied by native Indians, rubber tappers, and traditional forest inhabitants.

It is yet unclear how the situation will move forward. Visions of the future range from those of the environmentalists who wish to conserve the Amazon rain forest in its original state to those of people like Blairo Maggi, governor of the state of Mato Grosso and the world's largest soybean farmer, who told the New York Times, "To me, a 40 percent increase in deforestation doesn't mean anything at all. ... We're talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about." There have been other suggestions, too: The Economist has suggested that the Amazon's best hope might be as a national park.

If there is one consensus in the debate over the Amazon, however, it is that Brazil will need money -- perhaps lots of it -- if it is to preserve its rain forest. Last year, Brazil launched a $20 billion Amazon fund to do just that. The resources could be used for everything from monitoring to curb illegal logging to developing alternative livelihoods for Amazon farmers and cattlemen. Norway has already pledged $1.1 billion over 10 years for the fund, contingent on government performance, and has called on other countries to follow. At this year's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, a proposal will be tabled for rich countries to offset their carbon emissions by paying poor countries to maintain forests in tropical regions.

But for these initiatives to do much good, Brazil will have to first answer one question: Is saving the rain forest something Brazilians want to do? It's hard to tell. The country's population has gone from being a predominantly rural one to a mostly urban one in the last few decades. City dwellers who don't depend on the land directly for their livelihoods are probably more romantically attached to environmental preservation than previous generations. International groups are also pushing for conservation; Greenpeace, for example, has built up strong branches in Brazil. Yet, they still cannot compete with the influence of the traditional rural elites. The bancada ruralista account for between a fifth and a quarter of the Brazilian Congress and could play a pivotal role in the outcome of next year's presidential elections. Although this over-representation is a legacy of the dictatorship era, Lula is conscious of the need to align the block behind his chosen successor, Rousseff. She comes down firmly on the "development" side of the debate, often to the detriment of the environment. It doesn't bode well for  those who hope to keep the Amazon rain forest intact.