Award winning author, activist and world traveler Binka Le Breton began her adult life as a concert pianist. Between concerts she taught English as a second language   as she moved with her family from Nairobi to Jakarta, New Delhi, Recife, London and Washington DC. In 1989 she settled in Brazil and in 2000 she and her husband Robin founded the Iracambi Conservation and Research Center in one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots, the Atlantic Forest. She also began to write books. Her latest non-fiction book, The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang will be published by Doubleday New York in January 2008. The book looks at the life and death of an American woman who was assassinated in the Amazon forest in February 2005 while working to protect the rights of family farmers threatened by illegal loggers. Binka’s previous book, Trapped: Modern Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon, 2004, Kumarian Press, received a Judges Award at the Harry Chapin Media Awards in 2004 organized by the World Hunger Year, New York.  An earlier book, A Land To Die For, which focuses on the land wars in the Amazon, was recently adapted for the BBC World Service drama series.   

The Iracambi Conservation and Research Center (www.iracambi.com) is visited by dozens of students, volunteers and researchers every year, as well as hundreds of local schoolchildren. Focusing on how forests and people can work together, the Iracambi team has set up the first environmental education program in the state, established a sophisticated Geographical Information System which maps and documents changes in land use, and works with small farmers to research, grow and market products based on native forest plants. Iracambi plays a catalyst role in local development issues resulting in the creation of a new county, which brought not only health, education and improved communications to an isolated rural area, but also a new feeling of can-do to its inhabitants. Recently Iracambi has spearheaded community mobilization to protect a highly biodiverse conservation area from the threat of large-scale bauxite mining. President of the Brazilian non profit Amigos de Iracambi which is supported by sister organizations in the US and the UK, Binka also serves on the board of trustees of The Keystone Center, a non profit based in At Keystone Colorado which specializes in public policy issues and science education.

Binka is an accomplished speaker and advocate on environmental and human rights, whose travels by horse, dirt bike, river boat, truck, local bus and sometimes by plane, take her from remote settlements in the heart of the forest to the marble halls of the United Nations in Geneva.

Binka Le Breton: binka@iracambi.com, Tel : 55 32 3721 1436