During more than thirty years in journalism, I have never reported on a story like that of IPE. It has everything a journalist could ask for. Everything and more!

It is the adventure of a man who , at the age of thirty , leaves the directorship of a corporation to learn biology, at forty is in the jungle chasing a rare animal , and at fifty heads a Noah's arc in the Pontal do Paranapanema, where animals, researcher, landless settlers and ranchers attempt to get along. Its the story of a woman who leaves an interior designer career in Rio de Janeiro and a degree in Art History in Florida to accompany her husband to a wooden shack in rural Sao Paulo State , where she learns that she was a born environmental educator. Of a British millionaire who contributes part of the family fortune to grants for nature conservation and later becomes a best-seller. Jaguars and tapirs that, during their daily strolls, trace their own survival, where corridors of reforestation are to be sown to connect a sanctuary forest known as Morro do Diabo State Park , to the savannas of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul.. As if this did not suffice, field workers and townies, PhDs and locals workers, anonymous artisans and Her Royal Highness Princess Ann cross paths at this NGO that is not only about ecology, but more all-encompassing-one feels as gratified during mornings of field work as during gala evenings on the London stage of the Royal Geographical Society.

IPE is a great story. So great that it rarely fits into the narrow columns that the Brazilian press reserve for nature , which is a significant loss for the Brazilian press. Were it to pay more attention to such topics, it would be sustaining the biodiversity of its own newspaper pages and television programs, where today the same old topics regurgitate themselves until the entire country becomes decidedly bored with them.

But the great stories are not always newsworthy. News is preferentially something done quickly. Great stories, on the other hand, require an investment in reflection. A great story can be the beginning of great things that may or may not happen. The mainstream alternative only exists when something has a beginning, a middle and an end.

I realize that it is difficult to fit great stories into formats that generally were tailored to news. Try, for example, to describe IPE in few words. The result, as we see above, may be an agglomeration of events that, in the normal scale of human achievement, belong less to journalism than to fiction.

Since journalists rarely cross that line, between the conventional and the improbable, the reader of this book who has never heard of IPE can take comfort that he or she is in good company. But the reader does not know what he or she is missing. The Institute for Ecological Research is less recognized than we all deserve, itself included. If it were possible to recount with newspaper clippings, torn magazine pages or comments on television what IPE has already accomplished during its twelve years of existence-the fatalities that it helped avert, the Brazils it has discovered, those headstrong it has converted, the landscapes it has transformed, the enemies it has reconciled and the vocations that it has redeemed-if this could be recounted with only its appearances in the press, this book would not be what it is. It would be a large exaggerated volume.

That it has taken this form, so compact for such an important story, is because it is very much indispensable. Indispensable not only for IPE itself, but for all editorial boards in Brazil that still ignore it. A case like this does not materialize in front of a reporter everyday-in other words, the career change that, in a few years, led biologist Claudio Padua and his NGO to blaze inroads in a forest of disbelief is leaving , in the Pontal do Paranapanema , tracks of environmental regeneration to which only a satellite orbiting high above the Earth can do justice. This is an incomparable measure of greatness.

By: Marcos Sá Corrêa

* Marcos Sá Corrêa is a journalist who writes in the site www.oeco.com.br. He studied history, has worked as a photographer and has published four books. He has been editor-in-chief of the Jornal do Brasil and editorial-director of O Dia, as well as columnist for the magazines Época e Veja.