Marina Silva is the country’s main social and environmental leader. As one of the top names in the Brazilian political renewal, she won third place in the 2010 presidential race, with about 20% of the votes and forcing a runoff election. Her frail appearance belies the strength with which she acts in Brazilian politics for attention to natural resources and sustainable development.

Born in Seringal do Bagaço, 70 km from Rio Branco, Marina only learned to read and write when she moved to the capital at age 16. And it only took ten years from her achieving literacy and to earning a college degree in History at the Federal University of Acre.

Marina was a teacher, joined the Communist Revolution Party, and became involved in the union movement. Beside Chico Mendes, she founded the Acre Central Union of Workers (CUT), and in 1985 she joined the Worker’s Party (PT), for which she was elected alderman, state representative and senator.

In the Senate, Marina defended the importance of the country’s adoption of goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which was announced by the government in 2009.  She also convinced the National Plan on Climate Change to adopt the Brazilian goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

She was the Environmental Minister from 2003 to 2008. In this position under the Lula government, deforestation of the Amazon rainforest decreased 59%, which gained her international recognition for her work. She later resigned from her post, citing differences in the areas of infrastructure and development, and later switched from the PT to the Green Party (PV). In 2010, she became a presidential candidate for the PV.

One month before voting began, researchers estimated that only 8% of the electorate would vote for Marina Silva’s candidacy. But exponential growth towards the end, dubbed the “green wave,” earned her third place in the presidential race, with nearly 20 million votes. The following year she left the PV and remains unaffiliated with any political party.

A biographical book about her life was released in 2011, “Marina – A Life for A Cause.”

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is co-president of the “European Green/Free Alliance,” a mixture of ecological flags of several countries forming the European Green Party. Born in France, Cohn-Bendit earned the nickname “Dany the Red” thanks both to the color of his hair and his political convictions, at the end of the 1960’s. He studied sociology at the University of Nanterre, in a Paris suburb, and became the leader and spokesman of the May 1968 demonstrations. After the riots, the French government expelled him from the country.

The son of German Jews who had fled the Nazi regime in the 30’s, Cohn-Bendit settled in Frankfurt, where he began teaching at an avant-garde school. After 1978, he began working as a journalist and years later he introduced militancy to the German Green Party “Die Grünen.”

In 1994, he was elected to the European Parliament and served concurrently as the Deputy and Secretary of Multicultural Affairs of Frankfurt. In the same year, he headed a literary program on Swiss and German television, the “Literaturclub”, where he remained until 2003.

Cohn-Bendit is also a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and the European Parliament Committee on Constitutional Affairs. Today, he is known as “Dany the Green.”

Graciela Chichilnisky is a Mathematician and Economist who studied at MIT and earned a Ph.D. in Math and Economics from Berkeley. She is currently a Professor of Economics and Statistics at Columbia University in New York. A native of Argentina, she played an active role in the creation of the “carbon market,” as part of the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol, which became international law in 2005. She has written 14 books and has had roughly 250 scientific papers published in leading academic journals.

It was she who coined the term “sustainable development” in 1996. Having close ties to the United Nations Climate Change Convention and having been at the helm of world policy decisions regarding global warming, she represented the United States as the main drafter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Graciela is also a consultant for several United Nations organizations and heads of state, including Barack Obama, and makes use of innovative market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions and preserve biodiversity. In 2009, she was chosen one of Time magazine’s “environmental heroes.”