Blogs / Discoblog

Sometimes the best way to get people fired up about a cause—be it environmental, political, or anything else—is to get them angry. But instead of trying to piss citizens off, a Brazilian environmental group is trying to get the country’s residents to, well, urinate in the shower.

The group says that if a single household flushed the toilet just one fewer times a day, it would save a whopping 1,157 gallons of water each year. The organization has even come out with a video touting the idea. Urine is sterile, so peeing in the shower is harmless (except if someone has a disease that can be transmitted through their pee, such as hepatitis).

The AP reports:

The spot features cartoon drawings of people from all walks of life – a trapeze artist, a basketball player, even an alien – urinating in the shower.

Narrated by children’s voices, the ad ends with: “Pee in the shower! Save the Atlantic rainforest!”

Watch it here:

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Image: flickr /stevendepolo

The fuzzy photos of a “lost tribe” in the Amazon released in May turned out to be somewhat of a hoax—the government had known about the tribe for decades—but they raised a real question: How do you protect uncontacted tribes without, well, contacting them? To answer this, the Brazilian government has come up with a way to track the tribes from a distance, using high-altitude planes equipped with body-heat sensors.

The “lost tribe” photos were released by Funai, a group dedicated to protecting isolated people from land encroachment by loggers and farmers. Antenor Vaz, the head of Funai, says the body-heat sensors will allow the government to identify tribal territories without exposing the tribes to Western infectious diseases. The government can then set up protected areas and leave them in peace. The Brazilian constitution stipulates that all Indian ancestral lands must be turned over the tribes; currently, about 11 percent of Brazil technically belong to Indian tribes.

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