Exposing the beauty of the Amazon

If Amber Lee Ettinger is The Obama Girl, then Brazilian Carnival beauty Viviane Castro appears to be just the opposite.

Last year, Ms. Ettinger's 15 minutes of fame came with the viral video, "I've got a crush on Obama." Yesterday, Ms. Castro's minutes may have begun their countdown when she laid bare her protest of how the United States has intentions of stripping Brazil's lush rainforest for profit.

I can keep this short because the picture beats any thousand words I could come up with. 

As you can see, the Carnival Queen has no clothes. Rather than sporting a Carolina Herrera bustier dress, Castro made her appearance in the Sao Paulo parade doing the samba while wearing a strategically placed one-and--a-half -inch strip of tap--and lots of body paint.

On her left thigh Castro wore a portrait of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's face. Her right thigh bore the visage of the smiling American President. Above the two world leaders, painted on Castro's stomach, were the words, "vende se"--translation: "for sale." 

Castro said her message aimed to expose the liquidation of the resource-rich assets of the Amazon Rainforest to U.S. corporations. President Obama has been a little busy lately trying to repair eight years of Bush Administration incompetencies, stimulate the U.S. economy and save the world from a global recession. So he may not be paying too much attention to the systematic destruction of the Amazon Rainforest.

But, when he gets a little extra time, he should. ASAP.

The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it cleanses the air we breath by continuously recycling the earth's carbon dioxide into oxygen. It singlehandedly produces more than a fifth of all the world's O. It also holds a fifth of the world's fresh water.

And, as you read this, the Amazon Rainforest is disappearing. One and a half acres of the Amazon are being de-forested every second. By that count, if Viviane Castro were to literally just have 15 minutes of fame, 1,350 acres of the Amazon will have disappeared by in the brief time it took nude carnival queen to become a has-been. 

I'm hoping she'll be around much longer than that, revealing the naked truth audaciously enough to force the world's many media outlets to cover the rape of Amazon and all its beauty and global importance.

.