Another Earth Day Hoax

An
alarming email reached us yesterday from a friend an ex-colleague in
Brazil, alleging and alerting that the Brazilian congress was in the
process of debating a project that would have the eventual effect of
reducing the planets last great undeveloped expanse, the Amazon River
Basin, by half.  In part, it read:

"The Brazilian congress is now voting on a project that
will reduce the Amazon forest to 50% of its size. It
will take 1 MINUTE to read this, but PLEASE put your
names on the list and forward this on as instructed
below. The area to be deforested is 4 times the size of Portugal and
would be mainly used for agriculture and pastures for livestock. All
the wood is to be sold to international markets in the form of wood chips,
by large multinational companies."

Well this got us up off of our sorry green ass and into action.  We
immediately started composing a scathing blog post on how this was the
environmental equivalent of surgically excising one of Mother Earth’s
lungs, on top of her petroleum clogged arteries and radioactively rotten
fallopian tubes.

But before we hit the "Post" button, we decided to do a little actual
investigation, and were unable to find any outside confirmation of this
mysterious, unnamed "project".  furthermore, the email
address included in the email bounced back, and when we tried to follow
back the email trail we got three steps back, and then the trail died.  We
suspect this is another internet hoax, taking advantage of gullible armchair
environmentalists for God knows what nefarious ends. It figures.

So it looks like old Mother Earth can breath easy, at least for a while
longer.  The rainforest is actually just disappearing at the still
criminal but marginally less alarming rate of 2% a year.