Brazilian Minister Protects Her Forests - Daughter of Brazilian Jungle Becomes Its Most Powerful Guardian As Environment Minister

abcnews.go.com RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil Jan. 25 —

Marina Silva spent her childhood collecting sap from rubber trees and planting subsistence crops in Brazil's vast wilderness. She was 14 before she learned to tell time or do arithmetic.

Now, after a remarkable rise from poverty and illiteracy to the highest levels of government, the 44-year-old Silva has been named environment minister the top guardian of the forests where she grew up.

Dubbed "the forest senator" for her ecology crusades while a legislator, Marina Silva called her appointment a challenge "not just for me but for the whole government."

The major task she faces is saving the world's largest remaining tropical rain forest where an area the size of Belgium is cut down every year.

Silva grew up in those forests, in an Amazon village that had no schools. She she couldn't read until age 16, when she went to convent school, getting 12 years worth of education in four years. She later went on to a university and becoming a professor.

She suffered repeated bouts of malaria and years later, mercury poisoning from the treatments. It was a case of hepatitis at age 16 that took her to the state capital, Rio Branco, for treatment.

She decided to stay on working as a house maid, because she wanted to study and dreamed of becoming a nun.

She discovered Marxism at the Federal University of Acre and became a social activist. In the 1980s she began a political career, rising through the Rio Branco city council, a state senate, and finally, the national senate.

Environmentalists said her appointment as environment chief by leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shows the importance Brazil's first working-class president places on the environment.

"The choice of someone like Senator Marina shows that the environment will play a strategic role in this government," said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil.

But Smeraldi wonders if she will have the necessary tools to make a difference.

"The ministry ... today lacks the structure, budget and culture to do its job," he said. "To take advantage of all Marina has to offer would require a profound restructuring of the environment ministry."

Critics also question whether the success Silva had promoting sustainable development in her home state of Acre can be transferred to other parts of the Amazon. Silva says the solution is sound forestry management.

"You have thousands and thousands of people that live from this activity (logging)," she said. "The state has to do what it can to regulate it and create the conditions for it to be done sustainably.