Where Speaking Up Can Get You Killed

Speaking up against the status quo in America can cost a person a lot. If you live in a company town and that company is raining down pollution on you, you face being ostracized, harassed, threatened and intimidated. Maybe you get followed, or your private records get an unauthorized once-over. It can get pretty hairy.

Now imagine you were doing the same thing in China, or the Congo, or Brazil, where the global environmental "Rio+20" conference is going on right now.

According to the group Global Witness, 365 environmental advocates around the world were killed for their work last year, including Jose and Maria Santos of Brazil, a married couple who were both shot down in cold blood for their work in protecting the Amazon forest from timber companies. Jose predicted his own death only six months earlier:

"I will protect the forest at all costs. That is why I could get a bullet in my head at any moment."

Brazil recorded almost half of the killings worldwide, the majority of which were connected to illegal forest clearance by loggers and farmers in the Amazon and other remote areas.

It's no picnic to be an environmental advocate in Texas, the home of the world's petrochemical industry and the country's most virulent anti-green rhetoric. But it's not a death sentence either.