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The TV newsmagazine American Investigator looked into the claims about the Amazon made by environmental groups and celebrity activists and found that most of the hype is dead wrong. Yet Patrick Moore, a founding and former member of Greenpeace, says "only 10 percent of the Amazon has been converted to date from what was original forest to agriculture and settlement." According to Landsat satellite imaging and analysis carried out at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia, the rain forest is much greener than expected. As detailed in the recent TV special, Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting the Myths, Landsat data indicate that 87.5 percent of the forest is still intact. Of the 12.5 percent that is deforested, one-third to one-half is in the process of regeneration, meaning that up to 94 percent of the Amazon rain forest is left to nature. Philip Stott of the University of London and author of the new book, Tropical Rainforests: Political and Hegemonic Myth-Making [see note at bottom to order book], maintains that the environmental campaigns have lost perspective. "One of the simple, but very important, facts is that the rain forests have only been around for between 12,000 and 16,000 years," he says. "That sounds like a very long time, but in terms of the history of the Earth, it's hardly a pinprick. The simple point is that there are now still, despite what humans have done, more rain forests today than there were 12,000 years ago." Moore adds, "The rain forests of the Amazon, the Congo, Malaysia, Indonesia and a few other parts of the world are the least-endangered forests" because "they are the least suitable for human habitation." Despite the Amazon being at least 87.5 percent intact, many claims abound as to how fast the forest is being cleared. In the widely viewed 1985 TV documentary Amazonia, produced by the World Wildlife Fund, the narrator intones that "in the brief amount of time it takes to watch this film, roughly 400,000 acres of forest will have been cleared." Ruy de Goes of Greenpeace-Brazil says that in the last four years "an area the size of France was destroyed." Actor William Shatner in a National Geographic documentary claims that, worldwide, "rain forest is being cleared at a rate of 20 football fields a minute." Rainforest Action Network says the Amazon is being deforested at a rate of eight football fields a minute. Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief says that worldwide deforestation can be measured in seconds. "It may be closer to two to three football fields a second," says Keating. When de Goes of Greenpeace-Brazil is confronted with the disparity in numbers regarding these football fields, he replies, "The numbers are not important; what is important is that there is huge destruction going on." However, Moore says that the only way such huge numbers are generated is by using double accounting. "You would have cleared 50 times the size of the Amazon already if accurate." Luis Almir, an official with the state of Amazonas in Brazil, calculated using five football fields a minute and sarcastically concludes that, if the numbers were correct, "we would have a desert bigger than the Sahara." Another familiar claim of the environmentalist community is that the Amazon constitutes the "lungs of the Earth," supplying one-fifth of the world's oxygen. But, according to the Institute for Research in Amazonia and other eco-scientists, the Amazon consumes as much oxygen as it produces, and Stott says it actually may be a net user of oxygen. "In fact, because the trees fall down and decay, rain forests actually take in slightly more oxygen than they give out," says Stott. "The idea of them soaking up carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen is a myth. It's only fast-growing young trees that actually take up carbon dioxide." Many environmentalists claim that as many as 50,000 species are being driven to extinction every year because of the destruction of tropical forests such as the Amazon. Rainforest Relief's Keating weighs in with a hefty "450 species lost per day." These estimates are rooted in the research of Harvard University Edward O. Wilson, who based it on computer models of the potential, but as yet undiscovered, species that may be going extinct yearly. "There is no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct," says Greenpeace cofounder Moore. "I want a list of Latin species." Moore maintains no one can name these species that are said to be going extinct. "The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson's computer at Harvard University. They're actually electrons on a hard drive," Moore states. When asked if he can name a single species of the 50,000 that are said to be going extinct, Keating admits: "No we cannot, because we don't know what those species are." Moore is flabbergasted by such statements. "You're telling me that I'm supposed to prove that those species didn't go extinct when they're not there anymore and we never knew they were there in the first place?" Moore asks. "That's impossible. I don't know how Wilson can truck out the number 50,000 and keep a straight face." Another claim the environmental movement makes is that fires are destroying the Amazon. In recent years, it was reported that fires in the late 1990s equaled or even surpassed those of the peak "burning season" of the eighties. The Woods Hole Research Institute maintains that as much as half of the Amazon rain forest is "a tinderbox about to go up in flames." Moore counters: "To say that half of the Amazon rain forest is going to go up in smoke is just crazy. Of course it's not. That's completely ridiculous and extremist. But, let's say a large portion of the rain forest burned. The next thing that will happen is it will grow back again." Stott believes the more scrutiny the "Save-the-Amazon" cause gets, the more the bad science will be exposed. "When we actually look at these myths - this is what is terrifying about them - when we look at the science, we suddenly find that these myths are just insupportable - or 'unsustainable,' to use a nice green term. They just don't make sense." Keating, who calls the destruction of rain forests "the greatest ecological catastrophe," nonetheless concedes that the Amazon "is still the largest area of tropical rain forest left on Earth and has probably the lowest volume of clearing that has occurred of any large rain-forest areas in the world." Moore, however, believes that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the conventional wisdom that the Amazon is about to disappear will remain the conventional wisdom for some time. He says, "If people ... actually go to the Amazon, go to Manaus, get on a river boat and go up or down the Amazon for hundreds of miles, go inland and look for yourself or fly over it,[they] will see that you can fly for three hours over solid forest and really not see any sign of human habitation. It is not all burning up. It has not all been destroyed. And there really is no chance that it will be in the foreseeable future." The real cost of the Save-the-Amazon movement has been paid by the poverty-stricken residents of Brazil. Brazilians complain that the international environmental and celebrity campaigns to save the Amazon have harmed Brazil's ability to develop infrastructure and help the millions in poverty there. But just how do the environmentalists define poverty? Keating believes that there are a lot of "misperceptions about poverty." He says, "We perceive people to be poor if they don't have running water, they don't have electricity. I mean we humans have existed without electricity and running water for many, many thousands of years and, geez, we weren't extinct as a species." The poor who inhabit the river banks of the Amazon have felt the increasingly stringent environmental regulations supported by Keating. "The police have forbidden me," says Caboclo villager Janio Oliveira, "not to do anything that would harm the forest, like cutting trees. If they catch me, I will have to pay a fine and possibly go to prison." Fabio Ferreira notes that environmentalists have come to his village and have "exaggerated the point to tell us that we don't even have a right to walk through the jungle because it will destroy the ecosystem on that path." Oliveira's grandmother, Deuzita, asks, "If people don't let us use the forest, what will we survive off of? And if people stop us we'll die eventually." Despite the prevailing poverty in Brazil, celebrity activists lobby to keep out economic development and growth in Brazil. Actor Chevy Chase goes so far as to say capitalism is not the answer for the poor, maintaining that "sometimes socialism works" to help people out of poverty. He adds, "I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level." Chase believes that "Cuba might prove that." Actor Tom Arnold makes no bones about controlling development in the poorer nations. "It is arrogant, but we are going to have to help them. It's what's going to have to happen," he opines. Jayni Chase, wife of Chevy and head of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, justifies the poverty in Brazil because "environmentalists are trying to think long term, not just feed your child tomorrow. We're trying to think long term." Robert Whelan, the author of The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage, counters, "It's very easy to romanticize these things from a distance, as long as it's not your children who are dying without medical care." Laurie Parise, the executive director of musician Sting's Rainforest Foundation, doesn't dispute that the Amazon is nearly 90 percent intact. She counters instead that the intentions matter, "I know in my heart that we're doing the right thing." Rio de Janeiro engineer Guillerme Camargo opines that "we feel, as Brazilians, that living standards are being denied to us under such false arguments, under such false excuses. Why can't we have the same living standards like Europeans, like Americans?" Sorry Brazil, environmentalists and celebrities are more in tune with the feel-good cause than with the facts.