One possible method of reducing the deforestation in Brazil is changing people’s purchasing habits by making them aware of the impacts of their purchases. Hopefully, once they realize the damage that some companies cause, they will think twice about where their products come from. If this campaign is successful in affecting public opinion enough, companies may advertise about environmental friendliness and use it as a selling point. This is similar to the way the automotive industry regarded safety – nobody cared until reports circulated about the hazards of the Ford Pinto. Once people started to care, manufacturers focused more on safety and began to advertise their cars as being safer than competitors. This is an example of using a social fix to remedy a large scale problem. Unfortunately, it will be more difficult to make people care about deforestation than automotive safety because automotive safety directly affects people’s everyday lives, whereas deforestation is seen as a more distant problem.

This may be accomplished by producing and circulating advertisements in various forms, such as leaflets, posters, or advertisements in publications. These advertisements should include information about what companies are responsible, how much deforestation occurs per unit purchased (i.e. one tree cut down for every 100 hamburgers worth of cow raised, or how many newspapers come from one processed tree) and other information to give a perspective about what effect each purchase has. Other possible information for the ad includes how fast deforestation is expanding and how long the rainforest will last at the current rate. There should also be a link to a website that explains where all of the information came from and how the numbers were calculated, plus other information related to the cause.

There is a problem associated with advertising of this nature – libel. Many states have laws that allow agricultural industries as a group to sue for libel against any person or organization that publishes defamatory information. Even if all information in the advertisement is factually accurate, they can still sue and run up legal expenses that can run quite high, even if they cannot win the suit. One example of this is the recent case involving cattle ranchers suing Oprah Winfrey under the False Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995 in Texas. A jury ruled in Oprah’s favor in 1998, but her lawyer says that she spent over a million dollars on legal fees and expenses. Previous product disparagement laws required the plaintiff to prove malice and conscious falsification of information in order to sue, but new laws are making exceptions for slander of agricultural industries that make it much easier to sue. These laws shift the burden of proof to the defendant, who can now be sued for having made a mistake. People can now be dragged into court on suspicion that they cannot scientifically prove every word said. According to a letter to the environmental organization Food and Water, "nearly 30 state legislatures have passed or are considering legislation" of this nature.

One important note is that all of the cases that have risen over these laws is that all of them concern discussion of food safety to the buyer, not the effects of production in other areas. Despite this, industry and the courts could still use these laws to sue REAL, as these advertisements could be seen as defamatory. The simplest way to avoid these laws is to target the ads at non-agricultural institutions. By avoiding the agricultural industry, these special case laws no longer apply and any company that wishes to sue then has the burden of proving that REAL intentionally and maliciously falsified information to harm their business under the standard libel laws. Unfortunately, this eliminates cattle ranchers, one of the largest contributors to deforestation, from our scope, but it leaves lumber and paper companies open for discussion.

I will try to find more info about a specific company and make up the advertisement, possibly also the website eventually. This should be good for now, I will forward all new info/writings as they come to me.

Something that may not be obvious in the instructions – "If you wish, you may also attach to any draft a separate statement on how your team decided to respond to the instructor’s feedback and the critiques submitted by your peers." Just an idea, might be good to include if appropriate.