Lou Ann Dietz came to Brazil in the 1970s, serving with her husband James Dietz as Peace Corps volunteers. They began working on golden lion tamarin (GLT) conservation in Brazil in 1983 with a team of Smithsonian National Zoo biologists, Brazilian managers, and local community leaders in Rio de Janeiro state.
Realizing that the people of Silva Jardim—a municipality that harbored the last 200 wild individuals of the species at that time—were not familiar with the golden lion tamarin, she developed a targeted community environmental education program. This program led to documented behavioral changes and made the golden lion tamarin a national symbol for conservation.
The program, named "Redescobrindo a Mata Atlântica" (Rediscovering the Atlantic Forest), was updated over time. Since 2003, the AMLD has offered it as a continuing education course for teachers and educators from the municipalities of Silva Jardim, Rio Bonito, and Casimiro de Abreu, where there is a high concentration of tamarins in the wild.
Eight monthly workshops are held on Saturdays, featuring practical and theoretical classes. Each workshop addresses a specific topic, such as biodiversity, water resources, or conservation units. Teachers return to their classrooms with activities to develop with their students on the topic covered, and they share the results in the next workshop. To date, more than 750 students have been involved in classroom activities about the Atlantic Forest and its conservation through the educators trained in this course.
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