Since a dam burst at its Kingston coal-fired power plant last December and dumped more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge into a nearby community and river, the federal Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has decided to change the way it stores its coal waste, transitioning from wet landfills like the one that failed to dry storage of ash.

Now a company is pushing a plan to use dry coal ash from the Kingston plant to fill an abandoned coal mine in Tennessee -- but environmentalists are raising concerns about the proposal's health risks.

Smith Mountain Solutions, a company owned by the principals behind Wright Brothers Construction of Charleston, Tenn., has proposed taking dry ash from TVA's Kingston plant and using it to fill a former surface mine 20 miles away atop Smith Mountain in Cumberland County.

The company says it would install a protective synthetic liner first and abide by regulations of the Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation. Coal ash is not currently regulated as hazardous waste by the federal government, though the Environmental Protection Agency has said it intends to release proposed regulations by year's end.

Smith Mountain Solutions makes the case [PDF] that the plan would benefit the environment by cleaning up the toxic acid mine drainage that now runs from the mine site. Brock Hill, the mayor of Cumberland County, also supports the plan as a way to fix an environmental eyesore, The Tennessean reports:

But many residents stand in opposition, concerned about truck traffic and the potential for air and water pollution from mercury, arsenic, and other potentially toxic substances found in ash. They draw support from a list of heavy hitters that includes the Sierra Club and the National Park Service, both of which are partly motivated by wanting to protect the nearby Obed Wild and Scenic River.

Other groups opposing the plan include Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (an environmental advocacy group formerly called Save Our Cumberland Mountains), the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Their concerns include environmental damage and public health threats from contamination resulting from liner failure as well as from airborne coal ash -- a particular concern atop a windy mountain.

Coal ash contains a number of health-damaging contaminants including arsenic, lead, mercury, and radioactive elements. Children are especially vulnerable to the poisons in coal ash

A number of residents of the mountain road leading up to the mine site are also suing over the dumping plans. They include the owner of Black Cat Lodge, a drug treatment center that helps patients recover by getting close to nature. The residents say the mine filling plan has been drawn up without adequate public scrutiny.

Problems associated with dumping coal ash waste into abandoned mines have been documented nationwide. Earlier this year, the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice released a report titled "Waste Deep: Filling Mines With Coal Ash Is Profit for Industry, but Poison for People" that reported on the poisoning of streams and drinking water supplies by the practice.

Earthjustice estimates that about 25 million tons of coal ash waste -- about 20 percent of all such waste generated -- is dumped into old mines each year. The practice, which is occurring throughout the U.S. coalfields, is embraced by utilities because it dramatically cuts down on coal ash disposal costs.

But a four-year study of coal ash mine fills in Pennsylvania by the Clean Air Task Force found that the practice worsened water quality at 10 of the 15 sites examined, while the other five sites lacked adequate monitoring data to know whether the coal waste was responsible for adverse effects.

The plan being considered for Smith Mountain is different from many mine filling projects in that it includes a synthetic liner as well as a leachate collection system for runoff. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that most landfills eventually leak.

The leachate collection systems used in landfills are not foolproof either, according to the Environmental Research Foundation. The systems have a tendency to clog up or corrode after a few decades, and the resulting fluid build-up increases the likelihood of liner failure, allowing the coal ash contaminants to come in direct contact with groundwater.

Cumberland County is expected to receive about $1 million a year in dumping fees from the project. But the plan has already cost one of the local leaders politically, as Mayor Hill was replaced as chairman of the county commission last month for the first time in 15 years by a 10 to 7 vote of his fellow commissioners due to his pro-ash dumping stance.

Smith Mountain Solutions initially proposed taking the ash that was spilled in the Kingston plant disaster last December, but TVA chose to dispose of that at the already-permitted Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County, Ala. That decision raised concerns about environmental justice, since Perry County is 69 percent black with 32 percent of its residents living in poverty.

Cumberland County, Tenn. is 98 percent white, with 17 percent of its residents living in poverty -- a slightly higher poverty rate than the state's 15.8 percent, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

(A slightly longer version of this story with images and a table originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Vast new rainforest reserve unveiled in Brazilian Amazon

The Brazilian Amazon will soon be home to the world's largest tropical-rainforest reserve, in news that's making conservationists beam -- and making us feel better about all those pints of Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch we ate to help the cause. The vast tract -- which, at 63,320 square miles, is larger than England -- joins a corridor of protected land in neighboring nations. Combining an area of total conservation with one that allows strictly regulated logging and farming, Brazil's addition will also continue to provide a home for indigenous people, as well as endangered species like the northern bearded saki monkey. (Can we get one? Pleeease? We'll walk it and feed it and everything!) The goal is to encourage sustainable growth, says Simao Jatene, governor of the state of Para, where the reserve will lie. "This announcement allows a change in the perspective of those who look at Para and the Amazon as either a storehouse or a sanctuary," says Jatene. "We are none of these things."

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Billion-tree effort launches as new climate reports issued

Ooh, we love reports. A new one from a team of European scientists says the Arctic and Antarctic are linked by powerful currents, creating a "climate seesaw" that connects the fates of the poles and could help scientists predict the effects of polar warming on climate. A second, U.N.-commissioned report scolds rich countries for providing a "woefully inadequate" response to poor countries' desperate need to adapt to climate-change effects already being felt. "The adaptation agenda is somewhere between embryonic and heavily underdeveloped," says lead author Kevin Watkins. And a third report -- OK, this one isn't a report. But we do love it: Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai launched a project yesterday that will fight climate change by planting a billion (carbon dioxide-absorbing) trees in 2007. "Anybody can dig a hole, anybody can put a tree in that hole and water it," the Nobel Peace Prize winner says. "And everybody must make sure that the tree they plant survives."

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October 2004 was an exciting time to be a tree-hugger in Wangari Maathai's home country of Kenya. When she was announced as winner of that year's Nobel Peace Prize, many of my environmentally inclined friends and colleagues were eager to help her figure out what to do with the giant megaphone she had just been handed. Earnest volunteers with ideas and expectations streamed in and out of the downtown Nairobi office hurriedly established to handle the crush of publicity, clutching notes on what they thought the new Nobel laureate should do.

She already knew exactly what she wanted to do: continue planting trees. And so, to the consternation of those who wanted her to launch new campaigns and travel the world nonstop, talking about the global crisis facing indigenous forests, she chose to keep close to home. One dazed friend noted that, in her office, requests from local elementary schools to come plant trees were given equal weight to invitations to speak at Oxford University.

Unlike her fellow African Laureate Desmond Tutu, who used the platform provided by the Nobel to travel the world speaking about the evil of apartheid and other human-rights abuses, Maathai has kept her focus on Kenya. And unlike this year's winners, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which have made microfinance a cornerstone of international efforts to tackle poverty, Maathai's Green Belt Movement has found its greatest success in Kenya.

Unbowed, an autobiography by Wangari Maathai.

Read Unbowed, Maathai's autobiography, and you'll quickly understand that her focus has always been on her country. She was among the first generation of young professionals who came back after studying overseas to help the country develop following independence in 1963. She recalls her arrival in Nairobi in January 1966 after finishing her studies in the U.S.:

After this exhilarating ride from the airport came research and teaching positions at the University of Nairobi. Maathai also became involved in civil-society groups and served for a long time as the chairperson of the National Council of Women. Through her work with such groups, she eventually joined a political movement to challenge President Daniel Arap Moi's hold on political power. Moi, who succeeded Kenyatta in 1978, became Maathai's nemesis. Though he had separated from his wife Lena in 1974 (she died three decades later, believing to the end that she would one day be reconciled with him), the president sneered that divorcées such as Maathai had no role in public life. He called her, memorably, "that mad woman."

Unbowed, a straightforward and unfussy memoir, is most moving when it details the challenges this outspoken, accomplished, passionate woman faced in a Kenya that had no tolerance for anything other than quiet girls, quiet matrons, and quiet grandmothers. The first Kenyan woman to earn a PhD, Maathai's professional status and personal life suffered from the Victorian-era gender norms of 1970s Kenya. She fought for equal pay and to be taken seriously by her peers. Her marriage crumbled, due in part, she says, to her husband's inability to handle a strong partner. She endured a humiliating public divorce. She was repeatedly arrested and, in one harrowing sequence in Unbowed, forced to barricade herself inside her house and wait for the police to cut through burglar bars with borrowed army equipment and arrest her.

Kenya has less than 2 percent indigenous forest remaining, and trees are often hacked down to provide wood for charcoal, to clear land for agriculture, or to provide a place for the poor and landless (they are legion) to squat. Maathai's passion is to heal the scarred Kenyan landscape, which no longer resembles the green highlands she grew up in. Her tree planting first began as a commercial venture (she set up an unsuccessful business to sell trees from a nursery in her backyard) and changed into a nonprofit project. As she recounts in Unbowed, planting trees was, for her, a way to improve the lives of rural women by paying them for planting and tending to trees while tackling the alarming rate of deforestation. With support from Norwegian donors, Maathai became the full-time coordinator of the Green Belt Movement in 1982 and expanded her work.

In the way of all biographies, where a few breezy paragraphs cover years of lived experience, she skims over the tremendous work that must have gone into building an extensive rural enterprise that involved nurseries in remote areas, cash payments for tree cultivation, and verification systems that relied heavily on people who had powerful incentive to confirm that all was going well. She writes, "To my great disappointment, over the years we discovered that many of these young men [hired to keep accurate records of planting and survival rates] turned out to be dishonest." She insists that such fraud was detected and dealt with. Now, having gotten past these challenges, the Green Belt Movement claims that it has planted more than 30 million trees in Kenya.

The tree planting became overtly political when the Green Belt Movement opposed the grabbing of public land by officials, who would often pass out choice parcels to political cronies or family members (there is often considerable overlap between these two groups). Maathai points out that rewarding individuals with public land actually began with the British colonialists -- much of the most productive agricultural land in Kenya changed hands in just this way. Unfortunately, this is one legacy that won't die. Under the Moi regime, and even today, politicians hive off land held in public trust and give it to private interests. The Green Belt Movement fought this by planting trees on public land scheduled for private development, then using the media to draw attention to their efforts and to the land in peril.

In 1989, Maathai learned of a plan to build a $200 million skyscraper and business complex in the middle of Uhuru Park, one of the few open spaces left in a place once called "The City in the Sun" and now more often called "Nairobbery." (She eloquently describes the park as "a large swatch of open space amid the bustle of crowds and the concrete and steel of the metropolis." With equal accuracy, if less eloquence, it could be described as a leafy, idyllic haven for the weary pickpocket.) Maathai began a campaign to draw attention to this encroachment on parkland, pitting herself squarely against Moi; not only did the project have his blessing, it called for a huge statue of the president in the middle of the complex.

Due to Maathai's passionate appeals to local and international press, and to the concern expressed by the U.N. Environment Program and other donor groups based in Nairobi, the project was eventually stopped. Unbowed suggests that Maathai's ties to an international network of women's and environmental groups not only stopped the paving of Uhuru Park; it also possibly protected her life. The regime could arrest and harass her, but it knew that many people in the Western world cared about Maathai's fate.

Not that her life was untouched by risk and violence. In one memorable episode, Maathai recalls sneaking into Karura Forest in northern Nairobi through a back way, fording through a cold stream, and planting trees on a forest site given over to private developers. The police placed there to protect the land against vicious people armed with tree seedlings let her go that time, but, on a subsequent visit, hired thugs with sticks beat her badly enough to send her to the hospital.

The struggles over Uhuru Park and Karura Forest turned the simple act of tree planting into a political act, part of a pitched battle to save public land from private use. Maathai became even more political when, after a failed run for the presidency in 1997, she became a parliamentarian for her home region of Tetu. In 2003, President Mwai Kibaki, who succeeded Moi, appointed her assistant minister of environment and natural resources. She continues to hold that position, even after winning the Nobel.

Not all Kenyans appreciate the magnitude of the prize. Maathai is considered about as accomplished as Barack Obama, the American senator whose father was Kenyan, even though there are just a handful of Nobel Peace Prize winners in the world. But the Nobel has vindicated her years of struggle against the Moi regime and justified the idealistic, patriotic pride that brought her back to Kenya in 1966 with her American degrees in hand. Reading Unbowed, one gets the sense that no global prize, no matter how prestigious, can match for Maathai the victory of finally being accepted in her homeland for who she is.

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Judge puts Clinton's roadless policy back in action

In a Three Stooges-esque poke to the eyes of the Bush administration (nyuk nyuk!), U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte yesterday reinstated a Clinton-era ban on road construction, logging, mining, and other development in roadless national forest areas. In May 2005, the Bushies replaced Clinton's "roadless rule" -- which applied to 58.5 million acres, or nearly a third of national forest land -- with a process that required governors to petition the feds if they wanted to protect national forests in their states. Siding with 20 green groups and four states that had sued the U.S. Forest Service, Laporte ruled that the admin did not conduct necessary environmental studies before yanking the Clinton policy. ''This is fantastic news for millions of Americans who have consistently told the Forest Service that they wanted these last wild areas of public land protected,'' said Kristen Boyles of Earthjustice. The timber industry denounced the ruling -- not because they want to log, silly, but because they're worried that roadless areas are vulnerable to wildfire. The Bushies may appeal.

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Grass banks aim to protect prairies and help ranchers

Hoping to preserve both the prairie and the livelihoods of ranchers, green groups like The Nature Conservancy have created "grass banks" by buying up land and allowing ranchers to graze there for cheap. In exchange, ranchers agree to conserve habitat on their own land for ferrets, curlews, and other species. The New Mexico-based Quivira Coalition created the first grass bank in 1997; four or so others exist, and another five or six are in startup phases. So far, these programs have been lifesavers for endangered ranchers, but conservation benefits are not as clear. Critics say that grass banks encourage overgrazing, are cost ineffective, and are temporary: if the program ends, nothing keeps ranchers from dropping their conservation efforts. Says Stephanie Gripne, who studied grass banks as part of her doctoral program, "It's not a good strategy, but there aren't a lot of other strategies."

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On Arbor Day, appreciate the trees

Urban forest cover in many U.S. cities has declined about 30 percent over the past 10 to 15 years, according to the green group American Forests, and that's just not cool. Literally: loss of trees means loss of shade, more AC, and higher energy costs. On Arbor Day (you remember that today's Arbor Day, right?), it's worth remembering the many benefits trees provide. Urban trees reduce pollution and prevent storm water runoff. They boost surrounding property values by up to 25 percent. One study showed that hospital patients who can see trees from their windows stay an average of 8 percent fewer days. The city of Boulder, Colo., calculated that it got a $3.67 return on every dollar spent on urban forest. The lesson can't be learned fast enough: U.S. Forest Service data indicates that, in the U.S., an area the size of Montana will shift from forest to development in the next 50 years. So everyone: get planting!

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"It was on Cape Cod during fall a few years back, after the century fell but before the towers did, that I began paying a series of visits to the writer John Hay." With this opening line in The Prophet of Dry Hill, David Gessner sets the tone for a quest that is both personal and transcendent. Like "Call me Ishmael," this sentence also lets us know that we are in the hands of a writer with a strong grip on the helm. It's safe to lean back and relax into the journey.

Someone to look up to.

Photo: iStockphoto.

The book chronicles Gessner's relationship with nature writer and activist John Hay, which began when Gessner approached Hay, then in his 80s, to interview him for a biography. As they talk and walk throughout the changing seasons on Cape Cod, Gessner is pulled into Hay's ongoing dialogue with his place and its nonhuman inhabitants. What does it mean to know a place? Can human beings learn to get past our limited consciousness to coexist with other species? Is there any hope for our plundered, poisoned planet? And, yes, what is salvation?

Such questions are de rigeur for the genre of "nature writing," a canon of rant and rapture spawned by Henry David Thoreau and continued by his literary descendants -- from John Burroughs and John Muir to Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez. This bunch can get a tad churchy, a quality Gessner skewered in his 2004 memoir, Sick of Nature: "Throw an imaginary kegger and fill the room with nature writers throughout history and you'll get the idea. Henry Beston, looking dapper if overdressed, alternates tentative taco dabs at the cheese dip with Aldo Leopold; Barry Lopez sits in the corner whispering to Thoreau about the sacredness of beaver dams; Joseph Wood Krutch stands by the punch bowl and tells Rachel Carson the story of how he first came to the desert as Carson listens earnestly. In fact everything is done earnestly; the air reeks with earnestness."

The Prophet of Dry Hill:
Lessons from a Life in Nature
by David Gessner,
Beacon Press,
188 pgs., 2005.

Given this ambivalence about the genre, Gessner manages to avoid a stifling reverence for his primary subject through a command of craft: by keeping the story personal and specific, couched within his unfolding relationship with Hay, Gessner is able to raise grand questions without grandiosity.

Yet achingly earnest questions churn at the core of Hay's thinking and writing, and they form the subtext of the narrative. When Hay, an essayist who has penned 15 books, watches terns squawking offshore, he sees transcendence, ritual, harmony, balance, communion. He just can't help it. And he mourns humankind's insistence on setting itself apart from other sentient beings at a cost to all forms of life. In "Rescue Mission," an essay about a botched attempt to save oil-soaked seabirds, Hay observes: "If the only environment we pay attention to is the one we alter to suit our convenience, then we lose our inherited sense of a multitude of environments ... Will we become so detached from our sources in the company of existence as to be unable to rescue ourselves?"

The willingness to grant other beings their own consciousness and to count humans as part of a larger natural scheme are, in Gessner's view, what made Hay's writing "original and inspired." Hay's book The Run, about the annual herring migration, predated Silent Spring and infused life into a genre that sometimes lapsed into mere description, as though humans were reporting from a separate plane of existence. "John's approach was something different altogether," Gessner writes, "a message from inside." If Gessner lapses into the dreaded earnestness in such passages, the tone is at least true to his subject and its subtext.

Although midway through Prophet Gessner drops the biography idea, realizing that he has "begun to regard John less as a subject, more as a friend," he lets Hay do a lot of the talking and lays down enough biographical detail to make sense of Hay's diatribes. The story's climax comes when both men confront the fact that they may be leaving Cape Cod, putting down their shared struggle to stop rampant development. The defeated Hay, who once penned in his journal, "Hold on, hold on, help is not coming," tells Gessner, "This is a dying place." But Gessner, younger by nearly 50 years, can't give up the quest for salvation, for hope, and he now seeks it by following Hay's creed of shedding the human self, the better to commune with whatever lies outside.

Churchy? Well, yes. But straight talk, honest grappling, and the feel of sand underfoot save Gessner from the piety of some of his peers.

Finding a Clear Path
by Jim Minick,
West Virginia University,
277 pgs., 2005.

A walk with John Hay would probably send Jim Minick wading into the waves with rocks in his pockets. Minick, a farmer and writer who lives in southwest Virginia, publishes a regular column in The Roanoke Times. His book, Finding a Clear Path, compiles previously published essays and other writing.

The pieces are of different types. Some, like the title essay, chronicle observations from walks through the Virginia countryside. Others, like "Homes for the Holidays," are straightforwardly didactic. Still others, such as "Green Lumber, Green Profits: Sustainable Forestry in Appalachia," are reported articles. Sometimes the juxtapositions of transcendent observation and how-to are jarring. The writing is also uneven: at times it soars, but some passages flap awfully hard to leave the ground.

Of more significance, Minick's relentless cheer sometimes undercuts the import of his observations. In "Counting Birds at Christmas," for instance, he describes two men, Bill and Blair, who have long taken part in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. The men observe that many species of birds have dwindled steadily as development has claimed their habitat. "Still," Minick writes, "Bill and Blair regularly find much to hearten them." I would have preferred Minick to follow their observation to its obvious conclusion, and to comment more substantively on the issues, even if within the essay form: What kinds of habitat? Where? What would reverse the trend?

Minick's joyous appreciation of his part of the world will give pleasure to many fans of conventional nature writing. But the disheartening reality glimpsed by Gessner and Hay would add ballast to his celebration of berries and birdsong.

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A New Leaf

Su Thieda.

What work do you do?

I am director of programs for EarthCorps.

What does your organization do?

EarthCorps' mission is to build global community through local environmental service. EarthCorps restores native habitat while training young leaders and engaging volunteers in hands-on environmental service.

On a day-to-day basis, EarthCorps crews can be found in parks, greenbelts, streams, golf courses -- almost any public green space -- removing nonnative plants and replacing them with native species, or doing related work such as installing large woody debris into streams.

EarthCorps strives to be a place where young adults can explore their dreams, their ideas, their visions, and be supported for being the smart, powerful people they are. We also try to light the way for other people to get inspired about trees, fish, birds, and their community.

What are you working on at the moment?

One of my favorite projects right now is facilitating a research study that is evaluating the effects of urban forestry work on young people. The study is spearheaded by a fabulous researcher at the University of Washington and funded by the USDA through the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council. It is fun to prove what you already know -- that working outdoors is good for people.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

I always wanted to work with trees, so being the naive, semi-urban/suburban tomgirl I was, I thought I wanted to be a logger. I eventually learned more about what that meant and decided that I wanted to be a forester. College was not really an option after high school, so I joined the Young Adult Conservation Corps, a federal residential program to train young adults in conservation service.

In the early '80s, I completed a two-year Wilderness Leadership certification program at North Country Community College in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, which set the stage for my leadership roles. Then a string of assorted seasonal jobs with the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and environmental education programs. I finally landed a part-time position with the Student Conservation Association creating skill-based trainings to keep the art of cross-cutting, rock work, and timber work alive. I was at SCA Northwest for about 10 years before coming to EarthCorps two years ago.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

I was born near Los Angeles and currently live in Seattle.

What's been the best moment in your professional life to date?

Driving the first recycling collection truck into Seattle.

Who is your environmental hero?

My environmental heroes are the young adults (ages 20 to 25), corps members, who arrive at EarthCorps by bus, bike, and vanpool by 7:30 each morning to restore salmon streams, shorelines, and forests. Despite the challenges we face, they radiate with joy and are committed to making a difference in the world. For our international participants, add to that commitment living apart from their family and culture for six months or more. Currently we have individuals from Nepal, Tajikistan, Ecuador, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Brazil, Fiji, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Mongolia, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Talk about global wealth!

What is your environmental nightmare?

Capitalism. It is an economic system that puts greed before the planet's well-being.

What's your environmental vice?

I am still hooked on oil and gas. The furnace in my house, the car I drive a lot, the food I buy from faraway places, etc.

What are you reading these days?

I have started about four books this year and am making very slow progress on all of them (being a working parent doesn't allow much time for reading), but they are all great: The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, and The Street-Smart Naturalist by David B. Williams.

What's your favorite meal?

A salad from my garden.

What's one thing the environmental movement is doing badly, and how could it be done better?

We're not talking the language of the average working person. We need to talk about issues so that our grouchy uncle, religious grandmother, etc., can see the relevance. Specifically, we need to talk about the environment in terms of God's work, and our children's health and well-being. We need to make the environmental movement more inclusive by learning to speak and listen in ways that reach more minds and hearts.

What are you happy about right now?

Not only do I see the positive impact of our work on the ground, but I also see EarthCorps alumni (50+ young leaders complete our program each year) amplifying our impact as they move on to work with other organizations and continue to implement projects using skills and knowledge gained at EarthCorps.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Turn off your TV and go volunteer for something you care about.

Down to EarthCorps

Su Thieda, EarthCorps program director.

Does EarthCorps come to other cities [besides Seattle], or do you know of similar programs in other cities? -- Victoria Michel, Los Angeles, Calif.

EarthCorps is a locally based program. To my knowledge no other conservation service program is integrating U.S. and international participants. There are many other restoration/conservation programs, and I would start with contacting the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, which is the umbrella organization for over 100 conservation corps nationwide. Also check with AmeriCorps and the National Alliance for Community Trees.

I was surprised to read your response that "we need to talk about the environment in terms of God's work." How can we reach out to the religious in a way that will work? -- LauraMarie Taylor, Sacramento, Calif.

I have had some pretty good success avoiding environmental terminology altogether and bringing up topics to see where people's interests are -- once you can gauge where people have some enthusiasm (and it might be minimal), then you can frame further conversations around those topics -- the dahlias they grow, the bird feeder they have, the park their children play in. Frankly, I pick and choose when I disclose that I am an environmentalist. But I can always talk enthusiastically about cleaning up a park or my garden or whatever mutually green topic I can find that will eventually lead into more meaty topics -- it is slow work to win people over. You might also check out a group like Earth Ministry.

EarthCorps is a great idea. Why focus solely on young people? Is the work too strenuous for older people? -- Glee Murray, Washington, D.C.

It is true that our corps members are between the ages of 18 and 25. This is the guideline that we must follow as an AmeriCorps program. We work with about 10,000 volunteers a year and are fortunate to have volunteers between the ages of eight and 80.

Can you describe a specific project so we can get a sense of what an EarthCorps member does on a daily basis? -- Name not provided

This time of year the big focus is planting, so a crew may spend a couple of hours in the morning unloading and staging plants according to a planting plan. After that, they will dig a lot of holes and get trees and shrubs into the ground. The day may wrap up with spreading mulch around the plants. Before and after the project, the crew will spend time with the project manager and the agency coordinator to discuss the overall restoration objectives. The days are long, hard, and filled with dirt and fun. There are many types of projects, though. Check out this slideshow entitled "A Day in the Life of a Corps Member."

What careers do EarthCorps alumni get into? Is a year with EarthCorps comparable to a year in a forestry program or an environmental graduate program? -- Morgan Poncelet, Fremont, Calif.

They go on to many different careers -- not all environment-related, of course -- but some examples are: volunteer coordinator, native-plant landscaper, environmental consultant, project manager for a conservation organization, water-quality scientist, environmental educator, outdoor program leader, sustainable farm coordinator, trail crew member/leader, community organizer, executive director for an international conservation organization. EarthCorps is more like an abbreviated environmental graduate program since the range of educational topics is quite wide.

What are the minimum age and education requirements for EarthCorps workers? -- Debra Potts, Perry Hall, Md.

No education requirement. The minimum age is 18.

Do you offer internships? -- Jesse Herman, Marquette, Mich.

We offer internships as an AmeriCorps member -- you become part of a crew that is a part of a larger program that combines work and education. At this time, we don't have stand-alone internships.

Are you hiring crew leaders? -- Ken Duble, Dallas, Texas

Not at the moment, but we do twice a year. Keep an eye on our website.

How do young people go about signing up for EarthCorps? -- Debra Potts, Perry Hall, Md.

Contact our Recruiting Manager. We are currently taking applications for our next program, which will start in January.

What interaction do EarthCorps members have with local residents and land-users during their restoration projects? -- Name not provided

As much interaction as we can have. It would be impossible for us to steward the hundreds of sites we have worked on, so part of our mission is to develop connections with community members so that they will gain the skills and enthusiasm to keep up the restoration efforts. There are also many groups that have adopted a park or green space, and we work together to bring additional resources (human energy, technical expertise, or funding) to the project. We foster collaboration with many types of groups, and our goal is to help them experience restoration in a positive way.

Why so much attention and focus on nonnative species? What's wrong with them? -- BG (via Gristmill)

There is nothing inherently wrong with nonnative species, which can be in the form of plants, amphibians, worms, birds, mammals, insects, etc. The concern arises when these nonnatives either wipe out or severely compromise native species or the habitat needed to support native species. A great example of this is a project that was initiated in April 2004 by the mayor of Seattle to protect and restore the urban forests and park lands of this "evergreen city." Seventy percent of the 2,500 acres of public forest could be lost in the next 20 years if we don't stop the spread of English ivy. This ornamental ivy, which appears benign, has the capacity to climb and suffocate a mature conifer in the span of a few years.

Are there any organizations like EarthCorps that place volunteers abroad? -- Allison Leighton, Seattle, Wash.

We work with our international participants to support projects in their home countries, which often manifests in the form of an "international work camp." Currently, there are plans to have a work camp in Ecuador in early 2006. For the last four years, we have partnered with Earth Island Institute to support efforts to encourage eco-tourism with a long-distance trail around Lake Baikal in Russia.

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A video interview with Bill Moyers

Transmission accomplished.

The unprecedented hurricane season that flooded New Orleans and flattened much of the Gulf Coast this summer brought both catastrophe and an historic opportunity: building more-sustainable cities and infrastructure has suddenly become a hot topic. New Orleans doesn't need only restored wetlands and stronger levees to offer protection from future hurricanes and rising sea levels. Homes and streets, highway overpasses and water pipes and power lines -- all must be rebuilt. The city is fast becoming a radical experiment in redesigning infrastructure on a landscape-wide scale. In other words, the timing for Infrastructure couldn't be better.

Brian Hayes, a senior writer at American Scientist who won a National Magazine Award in 1999, spent more than a decade on this book. The result is a brilliant, sometimes dizzying tour of this country's built environment. It's an avalanche of nuts-and-bolts explanations accompanied by 500 of Hayes' own spectacular color photographs, which illuminate subjects ranging from the futuristic -- like the Mojave Desert's Kramer Junction solar-energy station -- to the unlikely -- such as Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill. While physically resembling a coffee-table book more than an Audubon field guide, Infrastructure delivers on its promise to be the "book of everything" for our human-made American landscape.

"Without a sense of how materials and energy flow through an industrial economy," writes Hayes, "you miss something about the world you live in." Most of us tap into this missing world every time we flip a switch or turn on a faucet, but we don't stop to think about how or why we get the desired effect. But Hayes brings us the hows and whys: from the wind farms of Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco, to the Gulf Coast's offshore oil rigs; from strip mining to drip irrigation; and from city water and sewage-treatment plants to New Orleans' levees, pumps, and canals, Infrastructure concisely covers energy, water, agriculture, transportation, communication, waste, and more.

Infrastructure:
A Field Guide to
the Industrial Landscape
by Brian Hayes,
W.W. Norton,
512 pgs., 2005.

Offering history and context, Hayes cuts through the spin. On the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, for example: "Opponents of nuclear power interpret the accident as a demonstration of just how dangerous and uncontrollable the technology is," he writes. "Proponents look at the same evidence and argue that the accident shows the inherent safety of nuclear reactors, since just about everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and yet there was no serious harm done to public health."

And after running down the basics, problems, and potentials of every major energy source, Hayes offers his no-nonsense view on the future of our fossil-fuel society: "The prospect of running out of oil a few decades from now should not be cause for panic or despair," he concludes. "Given that the whole infrastructure of the petroleum industry was built in less than a hundred years, there should be plenty of time to create its replacement ... And if a world without gasoline seems unimaginable, look back to the 1850s, when a world without whale oil and a whaling industry must have seemed equally unlikely and forbidding."

While making no apologies for heavy industry, Hayes gives only passing mention to the landscape-wide scars resulting from many of these different technologies: deforestation, erosion, acid rain, PCBs, radiation. Infrastructure presents no photos or sidebars describing the Superfund sites on the Hudson River or the Hanford nuclear site, for example, nor does Hayes discuss the direct roles our natural ecosystem plays as part of our infrastructure. After all, forests scrub air pollution, topsoil filters rainwater, wetlands buffer against flooding, and coastal bays and estuaries nurture a fresh and healthy food supply -- if we leave them all intact.

But the things Hayes does include make up for that lack. For those of us who try to solve environmental problems, his opus might become a classic. If knowledge is power, Infrastructure is powerful; it becomes a sort of introductory handbook for achieving sustainable technologies. After all, wouldn't a working knowledge of coal-fired power plants help us understand new-source review and how to best cut emissions? Couldn't a frank discussion of the pluses and minuses of drip irrigation lead to improved water conservation in agriculture? Wouldn't knowing the ins and outs of natural-gas drilling help us determine whether efforts to "minimize impacts" represent green innovations or just empty promises?

Hayes' book achieves two great things: it makes the progress of technology seem more remarkable, and the problems less intractable. In this Infrastructure, the possibilities are endless.

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A New Leaf

Walking It Off
by Doug Peacock,
Ewu Press, 208 pgs.,
2005.

Think you know Doug Peacock? Think again.

He was the inspiration for George Washington Hayduke, the hard-charging, Vietnam-scarred protagonist of Edward Abbey's classic environmental novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. But there's more to the Peacock story than just trashing bulldozers and causing trouble -- a truth his new memoir, Walking It Off, makes abundantly clear.

Becoming a spiritual leader for the environmental movement, he says, has been tough to live down. "You know, it's a terrible thing to read your own press," he says, "but it's even worse to live a life of somebody else's fiction."

Like his alter ego, Peacock, now 63, is a Vietnam vet, a committed environmentalist, and even something of a misfit loner. The Michigan native, fresh from the war, met Abbey in the late 1960s through a mutual friend. The two formed a fast bond, prowling the desert Southwest and Alaska together for the better part of 20 years. When Abbey died in 1989, Peacock was there, wrapping his mentor's body in a sleeping bag and laying him to rest among the scrub brush of the Arizona desert.

That's where Walking It Off, Peacock's long-awaited memoir, picks up the story, recounting several solo backcountry trips the author took in the early '90s. The book centers around a particularly fateful experience in Nepal -- where he nearly bled to death at high altitude -- and unfolds as he tries to make sense of his own mortality: revisiting old stomping grounds and stopping off at old Ed's grave in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness.

Walking It Off comes across as part adventure journal and part psychology lesson, as the author struggles to explain the opposing forces -- Vietnam and the American wilderness -- that have shaped his life. It's refreshing to see the human side of Abbey and his semi-mythic subject. Peacock, who's spent decades as an outdoor journalist and wildlife researcher, certainly knows what he's doing as a writer. After all, his Grizzly Years is a veritable classic of the genre.

But as the title suggests, Walking It Off tends to wander a bit. Peacock has traveled all over the world and tells some compelling stories, but the different threads tend to run together. One minute he's sleeping in a pickup, the next he's staggering around the Himalayas looking death square in the face. Though it all fits together in the end, keeping up with the narrative takes some flipping back and forth.

Peacock is currently working on a new project in the Yukon, but he recently took some time to speak with Grist by phone -- discussing his life, his friend Ed Abbey, and his ongoing love affair with the world's wild places.

This book draws a lot of parallels between Vietnam and the American West -- what's the connection there?

I was basically never able to separate the landscapes of Vietnam from the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, and I think that's guided my obsessions and my passions more than anything. I see fighting for wildness much like warfare.

Is that why you went out into the wild after Vietnam?

That was a little bit different. When I came back from Vietnam, I was like a lot of other veterans: I was really out of sorts, I couldn't talk to anybody, I didn't know what the hell was going on. So I went to the one place where I was comfortable in my life, and that happened to be the woods.

Describe your relationship with Ed Abbey.

Well, it was the most difficult close friendship of my entire life. And, you know, I was a real prick during those days: I'd hit the ground at any loud noise or sudden movement, and I'd fight at the drop of a hat. Ed, bless his heart, was and is an eternally cantankerous son of a bitch.

How do you think Abbey would respond to the current state of the environmental movement?

He would roll over in his grave. I think it's fair to say that there's never been an administration that's waged war against life more effectively than the Bush administration -- human life, animal life, and wilderness. Everybody has become entrenched -- worried about their corporate sponsors and their relationships with the government -- and you don't see many bold voices ready to take on everybody. Ed Abbey did that his entire life.

Is that why his work has endured?

He was a man who wrote about the freedom of dignity, and those were not goddamn empty words to Ed. He deeply cared about the kind of world he was leaving behind for his children.

What are your feelings on Earth First! and other radical environmentalists?

You know, I was never really centrally a part of that. I was too much of a loner. First of all, [Earth First!] was plucked right out of the pages of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and it was a surprisingly, wonderfully effective organization in that it brought a dialogue. All of a sudden, mainstream Sierra Club environmentalists seemed quite reasonable compared with what Earth First! was proposing. Those days were actually a little indulgent, but quite wonderful, too.

How would you define yourself now?

My life is dedicated to saving what's left of the wilderness, the wild country. But I have few social skills; I don't belong to groups and I don't join organizations. So I mainly stand on the sidelines cheering. I know a lot of folk and I serve as a sort of spiritual adviser to some very effective conservation groups.

What about the grizzlies? What drew you to them?

[The grizzly] is the one animal in North America that absolutely rivets your attention. You walk through Colorado, California, and pretty much any other place and you're top dog, but in grizzly country that is not the case. There's a fundamental humility you feel in grizzly country that informs us of our organic place in the world: close, but not at the top of the food chain.

Does that mean the years have tempered your view of death?

I had to make a friend of death in Nepal, because I didn't think I was going to get out of there. Fortunately, I had the great example of Ed Abbey. I mean, I walked with him into death a long ways, but he died such a dignified, wonderful, utterly alive death. Ed said, "The fear of death follows the fear of life" -- that a man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. I take a lot of strength from that.

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The winners: (clockwise from left) López, Ewango, Roth, Tamayo, Goldman (cofounder of the prize), Atakhanova, Jean-Baptiste.

Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.

You know it's been a tough year when you've spent half of it wondering if you're dead. Since the October debut of "The Death of Environmentalism," many environmentalists in the U.S. have indulged in spells of gloomy self-questioning. Do environmentalists need to rethink their priorities? Talk more about human beings than critters? Get religion? Give themselves a new name? The strategic questions have been endless, and often frustratingly abstract.

Of course, it's helpful for a movement to take a critical look at itself. But it's important to remember that some problems don't require long discussions of priorities or strategy. They're so obvious, and so serious, that they simply demand action, commitment, and a lot of courage. Throughout the world, passionate people -- whether they call themselves environmentalists or not -- are tackling concrete threats to humans and the world they live in. And the winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize are among the most inspiring.

These six grassroots activists come from all over the world -- Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South and Central America, and island nations. They've braved assassination attempts, civil war, and exile. They've confronted parliaments, presidents, corrupt government agencies, and the World Bank, and they've managed to change some minds in the process. Though their work is far from done, each reports substantial victories: forests protected, destructive projects derailed, protests acknowledged, trees planted.

The annual Goldman Prize is one of the field's highest honors, established in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman (he founded Goldman Insurance Services in San Francisco; she was a descendant of jeans-maker Levi Strauss). Winners are nominated by environmental organizations and chosen by a panel of activists, including past recipients. Each receives an award of $125,000. This year's winners will be honored in a ceremony in San Francisco on April 18.

In this special series, Grist speaks with the honorees, sharing their tales of triumph and defeat, of agony and ecstasy -- and providing just a smidgen of hope.

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A New Leaf

Wal-Mart pledges to buy and preserve land to compensate for footprint

Retail leviathan Wal-Mart, stung by a spate of bad press accusing it of sprawling consumption of open spaces, excessive storm-water runoff at construction sites, discrimination against women, employment of illegal immigrants, ruthless price-cutting strategies that drive jobs abroad, and shabby treatment of employees ... er, "associates" (did we miss anything?), has launched a campaign it hopes will burnish its tainted image. The company pledged yesterday to buy and preserve enough land to compensate for the acreage lost to its stores, parking lots, and distribution centers for the next 10 years -- and trumpeted its pledge in full-page ads in at least 20 newspapers. The land will be purchased through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit conservation organization created by Congress in 1984. Wal-Mart said it will spend $35 million on its "Acres for America" program -- roughly 0.014 percent of its quarter-trillion annual sales.

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Congo Basin rainforest protected by treaty

The world's second-largest rainforest, spanning 10 countries in the Congo Basin of Africa and disappearing at a rate of some 3.7 million acres a year, is now a wee bit safer. This weekend, leaders of seven central African nations signed a treaty aimed at slowing the widespread illegal logging, poaching, ivory trafficking, and bushmeat trade that are rapidly destroying the forest. The treaty will standardize logging rules in the region, make tracking border-crossing poachers easier, and step up patrols for illegal logging. But the project, in the works since 1999, remains woefully underfunded. The projected budget for the effort was to be 40 percent funded by Congo Basin countries, with the remainder coming from international aid. But so far, only France and the U.S. have contributed. Conservationists, of course, applauded the treaty, since funded or not, it's a high-profile admission that the region has an illegal logging problem.

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Ex-millionaire surrounded by trees, little else

Former real-estate mogul Xing Yiqian is well-known on the Chinese island of Hainan for his dedicated conservation of the area's dense rainforest. Called the "tree god" by locals, Xing spent his fortune -- once valued at $24 million -- paying individual landowners not to cut down their trees, financing expensive transplants for unwanted trees, and creating China's first private nature reserve. But sadly, though Xing tried to keep up with the Bill Gates and Ted Turners of the world in the charitable-giving realm, he fell far behind in the accounting department. Xing spent so much of his time and energy on his cash-for-trees strategy that he neglected his real-estate business and had to sell his assets when the market crashed, leaving him with little more than occasional bus fare and enough money to support the three-pack-a-day smoking habit that he says keeps him sane. But Xing's rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags-again story is far from over; he has big plans to turn some of his land into a lakeside resort.

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Pataki protects big swath of New York's Adirondack Mountains

New York Gov. George Pataki (R) yesterday announced a deal whereby some 104,000 acres of land in the northeastern Adirondacks will be protected from development and opened up to public use -- the third-largest land conservation deal in state history. The parcels of land lie on a contiguous swath of forest, which makes it particularly significant for conservation purposes, as it is a migration corridor for several large mammals and birds. Limited logging will continue, but development will cease, to the chagrin of some local residents. The eco-friendly Pataki, like his muscle-bound California counterpart, is widely viewed as positioning himself for a bigger, brighter political future -- though the prospects for Republican moderates are, at this point, uncertain at best.

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Photo: © 2000 David-Lorne Photographic

We are destroying our country -- I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.

We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all -- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians -- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes -- the farms and ranches and working forests -- and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work.

It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.

Nearly 40 years ago, my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of "reclamation," strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land's future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the earth is God's property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?

In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed -- in fact we have officially encouraged -- the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, the people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?

But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.

Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every part of our country. You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there.

What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places -- that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities.

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

We citizens have a large responsibility for our delusion and our destructiveness, and I don't want to minimize that. But I don't want to minimize, either, the large responsibility that is borne by government.

It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.

Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.

We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.

Because as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions, we need our state and national governments to protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.

Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone justify, a government's willingness to allow the human sources of necessary goods to be destroyed by the "freedom" of this corporate anarchy. It is equally impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even subsidize, the destruction of the land and the land's productivity. Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the earth and the human capacity to use it well. The governmental obligation to protect these economic resources, inseparably human and natural, is the same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders. In result, there is no difference between a domestic threat to the sources of our life and a foreign one.

It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the earth, or to permit the earth to be destroyed a little at a time -- like the famous three-legged pig that was too well-loved to be slaughtered all at once.

The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the earth, then eventually we will destroy it all.

So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions.

We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food, and raw materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far.

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by "bringing in industry." Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by "tax incentives" and other squanderings of the people's money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land -- for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country's defense, become the agents of our country's destroyers, compromising on its ruin.

And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip-mining, Joe Begley of Blackey: "Compromise, hell!"

This article originally appeared in Orion, 187 Main St., Great Barrington, MA 01230, 888.909.6568 ($35/year for six issues). Printed with permission of Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers.

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Jeb Bush borrows money to accelerate Everglades plan

President Bush has made much of his devotion to wetlands, even vowing during the second debate to "increase the wetlands by 3 million." Three whole million! But the nation's biggest environmental initiative -- signed into law in 2000 and aimed at restoring Florida's most beloved wetlands, the Everglades -- is moving at a snail's pace, say critics. In an election year, that won't do, so brother Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, is stepping in for an assist: Yesterday, flanked by high-ranking (George) Bush administration officials, he announced a plan to borrow money -- something he had previously opposed -- to pour $1.5 billion of state funds into a plan called "Acceler8," which will jumpstart the lagging program to restore the Florida Everglades. The program is hugely popular in Florida, a swing state that (George) Bush won by a razor-thin margin in 2000. Enviro groups begrudgingly welcomed the plan, though they expressed reservations that it was developed behind closed doors and left open the possibility that the state could weaken important regulations. Still, said April Gromnicki of Audubon of Florida, "These are a lot of the things that the environmental community has been asking for."

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Judy Logback.

With what environmental organization are you affiliated?

I arrived in Ecuador in 1997 and throughout the past seven years have visited and worked with more than 600 rural families to encourage them to establish the Kallari Association, a small farmers' and artisans' organization dedicated to sustainable organic production of a diverse array of products, made up of 24 Amazon indigenous and mestizo communities, totaling 1,700 members. The farmers and artisans who make up Kallari are dedicated to meeting their basic economic needs without sacrificing Amazon rainforests, historical ethnobotanical knowledge, or cultural traditions.

I am considered the founder of Kallari, but my current position deals much more with development. In the past two years I have managed to turn over the majority of the administrative responsibility to Kallari's democratically elected directive board.

What, in a perfect world, would constitute "mission accomplished"?

When the Kallari Association's artisans and farmers are earning an annual income of no less than $2,500 per year per family. Compare this to when I arrived in the region, when a farm family earned little more than $500 per year and the main cash-crop markets available consisted of coffee, cocoa, corn, and timber.

What do you really do, on a day-to-day basis?

Every day is very different and it is a little difficult to portray the scattered activities I am involved in.

In a given year I spend 10 months in Ecuador -- roughly half of that time is in the Amazon, and the other half in Quito. For the past two years I have traveled a couple of months in the U.S. promoting Kallari and trying to sow a global conscience. My favorite activities when I am in the Amazon are to hike through rainforest trails and cross Amazon tributaries to visit the farms of the Kallari members to see old friends, learn about more species of plants used for craft production, review cocoa trees, buy fruit and hardwood-tree seed, deliver checks, letters, or invitations, and enjoy Amazon foods. About half of my time in the Amazon I teach rainforest ecology courses.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

I am from Kansas and spent most of my childhood in a farming village, where most families derived at least half of their income from farming. In high school and college, I had the opportunity to work at The Land Institute, an excellent nonprofit organization established to research sustainable agriculture. From there I received a scholarship to attend Beloit College in Wisconsin, where I earned a B.S. in environmental biology and Spanish.

I had several biological-research, conservation, and habitat-restoration positions, but although I enjoyed the challenges of biological field research, it left me with a sense of failure. As researchers we could study the decline of species diversity or attempt to find the most intact ecosystems and promote land purchase or easements to prevent them from becoming strip malls or suburban neighborhoods. However, we could not solve the underlying problems of economic progress fueling the destruction of natural resources.

I felt that instead of land purchase and reserve management, grassroots work with rural people was the more urgent necessity within conservation work. I dedicated my career to countering rainforest destruction, but more with tenacity for creating sustainable markets than biological expertise. If international markets are the leading cause of tropical deforestation, than as members of the international community it is our responsibility to create and develop markets that reinforce rainforest conservation, while promoting the preservation of cultural traditions.

How many emails are currently in your inbox?

I have more than 350 right now, but I try to keep it at less than 100. Unfortunately I spend much of June and July in the Amazon without internet access so I am still trying to catch up.

Who's the biggest pain in the ass you have to deal with?

Extractive industries (specifically logging, oil, and gold mining in Ecuador) that use their power to manipulate local government, contaminate the landscape, and completely override labor and human-rights policies.

Who's nicer than you would expect?

I have been amazed by the Ecuadorian people's willingness to share the little they have -- the shop owner a block from our apartment in Quito will gladly lend me food for a week or two, until I have the money to repay him for my staples.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

Wichita, Kan., in the U.S. Tena or Quito, in Ecuador.

What do you consider your environmental coming-of-age moment or experience?

Although my parents were incredible examples of environmental stewardship, I rejected their frugal lifestyle until meeting my high school biology teacher, John Craft. He took the time to answer our probing questions about his life decisions and by doing so helped us realize that each of our actions have social, environmental, and economic impacts in other parts of the world. My general life goals and vocation were completely solidified by the time I was 16 years old and they have changed very little in the past 15 years.

What's on your desk right now?

I have been invited to accompany the Kallari board members to promote their cocoa at the Slow Food Salone de Gusto in Italy, the Terra Madre agricultural event, and the Eurochocolate Festival, all sponsored by Slow Food, for 11 days in October. I am concerned about preparing all of our presentation materials and handling the logistics of traveling with people who are not experienced backpackers.

Also, we are preparing to maximize the sale of Kallari crafts before the holiday shopping rush, as we have a diverse stock of crafts and only a few months to sell the majority of our merchandise. I have already received two or three orders this week, after a summer drought of marketing activity.

What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?

The Ecuadorian president (who seems to have funded his election campaign through support from the U.S.) has proposed and is in the process of passing a bill that makes all genetic material, except human, property of the state. This includes all ethnobiological applications and basically overrides former international policies to protect the intellectual property rights of the indigenous nations of Ecuador. Although it may not be a direct environmental offense, I foresee that the long-term environmental effects of completely stealing a people's right to the intellectual use of their biological resources further threatens natural resources and obliterates their market potential.

Who is your environmental hero?

I recently had the honor of meeting Judith Kimerling, the woman who researched and documented environmental and social violations by the Texaco oil company in Ecuador. Her work led to the current lawsuit against Texaco and has been an incredible motivation for me during my time in Latin America.

Who is your environmental nightmare?

Dick Cheney and his puppet, George W. Bush.

What's your environmental vice?

I don't have the space or time to cultivate my own organic grains, vegetables, and fruits. I do look forward to a time when I can find an empty lot nearby and rent it to spend at least an hour each day growing enough produce for at least the bulk of my own nutritional requirements.

I also rent a large apartment in Quito where friends, volunteers, and staff stay in a community-type atmosphere. It has electricity from the hydroelectric dams and hot water heated by natural gas. I would prefer to have the money to help Kallari restructure a building in Quito with solar-heated water and solar-energy collectors.

How do you get around?

I often take public buses to Tena and to project visits that are more than 30 miles from Quito; however, I attempt to ride my bicycle or walk whenever possible when I am in the city.

What are you reading these days?

Song of the Dodo, Beyond Backpacking, Cradle to Cradle, Good Stuff (Worldwatch Institute guide to consumer decisions), and I like to keep Dao de Jing with me to reflect on from time to time. I am awaiting the arrival of Stolen Harvest and recently finished Fast Food Nation and Savages.

What's your favorite meal?

I'm always satisfied after eating odd fruits and nuts all day and sitting down to a typical rural meal in the Amazon. The average dinner includes beans, rice, boiled plantains, manioc with chili sauce, fresh fish (cooked in leaves), and sweetened lemongrass or cinnamon tea to wash it down.

Are you a news junkie?

I am so busy that when a strike paralyzed the nation of Ecuador and the president was overtaken by a coup, I barely noticed.

Which stereotype about environmentalists most fits you?

My father paid me what I consider to be one of the greatest compliments when he said, "You are not only an environmental activist, but an active environmentalist." I have not purchased a new piece of clothing in years, or a new pair of shoes in over a year. I use natural soaps and leftover shampoo bits from other housemates. I put little effort into my personal appearance, ride my bicycle almost everywhere possible, and try to invest much of my meager earnings back into my work with Kallari. My material goals in life include never owning a combustion-motor vehicle, a television, or a DVD player.

What's your favorite place or ecosystem?

I have yet to find somewhere as impressive as the rainforests of the Andes foothills, at the beginning of the Amazon basin.

Would you label yourself an environmentalist?

Most of my friends and staff call me one, and I think they are correct, since I dedicated my career to the environment when I was young. I also consider myself a humanist and realize that we will not prevent habitat destruction until we take into account the social and economic factors that lead to environmental devastation, seek alternatives, and make them easily available to the most isolated rural people (who are the true stewards of the majority of the world's remaining private property of high biodiversity).

What's your favorite movie?

The Trip to Bountiful is one of my all-time favorites.

Mac or PC?

We use both, but I prefer Mac because it has much less risk of virus infection, and our database is on a Mac because they are much more reliable and user-friendly.

What are you happy about right now?

Although my work can be stressful, I love the challenge and could not imagine a job that would fulfill me more and capitalize better on my talents, experience, background, and interests. Even though I don't have children, I feel a tremendous responsibility and an honor that I have managed to find a career that not only helps the environment, but actually empowers people to protect their own rainforests.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Spend time with a child and make the effort to explain why it is important to live in modesty and learn to appreciate what you have. The incredible pressure on youth to purchase and consume needs to be balanced by discussion and a good example from their parents and other adults.

Amazon Women on the Move

Judy Logback, founder of the Kallari Association.

What is the level of understanding of the native people that you work with about the crucial role of the Amazon rainforest in biodiversity and global warming? Has their perspective changed since you first arrived there?    -- Sue Kaufman, Portland, Ore.

I think that when I arrived many of the people had an excellent view of the importance of the Amazon. The local radio stations in the Amazon are quite effective at promoting the idea that the Amazon rainforests are the "lungs" of the earth and many of the Kallari artisans and farmers are aware of this fact. I have also questioned people about the future of the region if the forests are decimated, and the response I received was, "If we continue to fell our trees at this rate, it will rain less, the crops will not produce, the rivers will dry up, we will probably have to move somewhere else, and it might be like that desert in Africa that gets bigger each year."

I do think that it is hard for them to grasp the incredible biological diversity of the area, in comparison with other ecosystems -- more biodiversity located within 12 square miles than most of the continental U.S. It is even hard for a biologist like myself to grasp, never mind a person who has only been exposed to a region of mega-diversity. We try to promote field trips to other areas and include biological comparisons in the handcraft workshops. Our goal is to help Kallari members see how "sterile" other ecosystems appear in comparison with the wealth of wildlife found in the Amazon rainforests -- so they will value their natural resources even more than they currently do.

You talk about measuring your success in terms of income/work for the community in which you work. This is clearly a key measure. I am wondering if you also have measures related to preserving habitat or preventing extinctions of endemic species. Do you have any results or victories in this domain resulting from the work of the Kallari Association?    -- Sue Kaufman, Portland, Ore. (Yes, again.)

Initially, we are trying to establish management plans in the Kallari communities, to be certain that handcraft production is not causing a negative effect on the local biodiversity. Additionally, we monitor the number of plant species used to make Kallari handcrafts, and promote that the artisans use a) as many species as possible and b) small amounts of species that are not domesticated or cultivated. Currently, Kallari artisans use over 200 plant species in their handcrafts, which represent nearly 10 percent of the botanical diversity in the region. Our goal is to reach nearly 25 percent, meaning that a market would exist for over 500 plant species and thus reduce the pressure on any single species.

Do you think that what you are doing is a model for habitat and species preservation in the developing world? If so, how can the word be spread?    -- Sue Kaufman, Portland, Ore. (Look, she's on our board, OK?)

I think that as conservationists we must accept that mere land purchase has not solved the problem of biodiversity loss. We must seek new alternatives and find ways to work together with rural people to find answers to their economic problems without obliterating their natural resources. Kallari is less than a decade old, has had little international funding, and has grown to include members who manage over 75,000 acres of rainforests and farms. Considering the total amount of international funding and donations that Kallari has received so far, it comes to a cost of less than five dollars per acre to establish the handcraft market system. It may take another 10 years of small grants for Kallari to become completely independent and self-sufficient, but even at a cost of $10 or $20 per acre, is it a fraction of the cost of land purchase, does not require separating rural people from their land, and is self-sustainable -- needing no funds to cover wages for park guards, land taxes, and reserve-management expenses.

There are many avenues for helping to spread the ideas and principles that have proven successful for Kallari to other regions. I think that Peace Corps, funding organizations, church missions, and international NGOs can play an important role in spreading the word. However, I am considering publishing a book that summarizes the valuable lessons we have learned and making it available to people who want to consider volunteering internationally. I think that unattached volunteers on a person-to-person basis have the most freedom and opportunities to work with rural communities.

I have found that nonprofit organizations in developing countries are much more efficient than the large international partners passing out the funds. For example, within Ecuador it appears that The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and Conservation International monopolize conservation projects. In some cases, an international partner will share only half of the costs of a project with the partner NGO that actually carries out the ground work and keep the lion's share for their own administrative costs.

However, I truthfully feel that small community organizations are even more efficient than home-country NGOs. It requires a great deal more effort and time, but I think that long-term tropical conservation will not be possible until the active players are the landowners themselves. I believe that in the case of Kallari our actual success has not been due to myself or the NGO that helped form a community organization. Kallari exists because of the desire of the community leaders to fulfill the needs of their members and provide opportunities for future generations.

What is your assessment of the craft cooperative in comparison to other sustainable economic models like ecotourism?    -- Henry Adzuki, Dove Creek, Colo.

I think that ecotourism works well on a small scale, but unfortunately of the 100-plus communities that have mentioned to me that they hope to work with ecotourism, I know of only two communities in Ecuador's Napo Province that have semi-successful ecotourism programs. I think that handcrafts as well have their limited market, which is why Kallari is constantly researching new products. Our newest line includes belts and natural soaps, and we are in the beginning stages of reviewing potential home furnishings to complement our previous line.

I think ecotourism also requires a much greater cultural adjustment than handcraft creation or working to provide value-added products from agricultural produce. Several projects working with small micro-enterprises tend to be more successful than ecotourism, because the initial investment is less, and it is a product that can be easily marketed to the local population.

What are the requirements of membership in your association? Or do you attempt to work with any and all interested artisans in your area?     -- Name not provided

The Kallari Association allows members to join on a community basis. Once a community decides to join Kallari, the majority of its members must participate in the craft workshops and be willing to pursue organic certification for their crops and stand up to the oil companies. Although individual families have the option of joining Kallari, most of the members are first members of a community that is part of Kallari. For any community that joins the association, all of its members older than 10 years of age are allowed to be full members.

Has anyone ever given you trouble for what you've been doing with the Kallari Association, say, oil-company thugs or crooked government officials?     -- Name not provided

To me it has been more disheartening to see the oil companies pay off a number of indigenous leaders of the federations in the area. Although Kallari communities stood up to the oil companies, there have been no serious threats so far. We do receive mild warnings from time to time from commercial intermediaries, but have had no robberies or assaults. They are concerned by our efforts to help the communities overcome the low prices available in local markets for coffee and cocoa. When the Kallari communities export their organic produce directly, they are eliminating the livlihood of various intermediaries.

I have received words of caution numerous times, and narrowly missed the assault of a biological station by a band of armed men hired by Ecuador's largest wood exporter, but have not felt my life in danger yet.

What would be the likely impact on the Kallari cooperative if the bill you mentioned making genetic material property of the state actually passes?     -- Beverly Griser, Punxsutawney, Pa.

For the moment I think it may have little impact, but I fear that it will completely obliterate the market potential for the traditional medicinal remedies used by the Kichwa people. If foreign pharmaceutical companies can purchase the plant material used to make the remedies from the Ecuadorian government, isolate the active compounds and synthetically reproduce them, before a community organization like Kallari has a chance to bring their own holistic healing products to market, Kichwa people will lose various potential markets. If rainforest people have cures for several types of cancer, arthritis, epilepsy, asthma, and other chronic illnesses, but the pharmaceutical companies can get a product to market first, what market will remain for a remedy from a small rainforest cooperative?

I remember watching a documentary about indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest when I was in school. I was fascinated to learn about whole societies that had never seen modern man and knew nothing of modern conveniences such as electricity and running water. Have you encountered any of these groups? Do they even still exist?    -- Name not provided

The Huaorani indigenous group of the Ecuadorian Amazon had a small number of families that divided off about 15 years ago. They continue to live with no contact from outsiders and have requested that the other Huaorani and outsiders respect their wishes. Unfortunately, the Ecuadorian government is going ahead with their plans to extract oil from this region of the Yasuni National Park. The Tagaere and a few other small clans are thought to be the only groups in the world that have not had contact with "modern" societies.

The Kallari members are mostly of the Kichwa indigenous group, and have been exposed to Spanish influence for several centuries. However, most the Kallari communities do not have running water or electricity, and their lifestyle varies little from that of their ancestors.

Your organization seems to be propagating the "good kind" of globalization, as in, sustainably made goods being sold on the global market at a fair price to consumers around the world. Do you think that "good" globalization will eventually prevail over the destructive, race-to-the-bottom, exploitative kind?    -- Trevor Fredanza, Yreka, Calif.

I think the true test will be in the education of the next two generations. Even if "good" globalization is prevalent, it is necessary for organizations like Kallari to have a dependable client base, and if we do not have the promotional budget like large corporations, how can we contact our potential clients and inform them of our products? I hope that there is a turnaround, and think that Europe is a sign that it is possible. I see it as inevitable, but am curious how many decades it may take to occur.

Who do you find are the most frequent buyers of your wares? To whom do you regularly market the crafts?    -- Name not provided

Kallari items appeal to a wide range of consumers, so it is difficult to say that a specific type of person is our main buyer. I would have to say that the only difference I have noted is overall familiarity with the origin of the crafts. Regardless of a person's background, once they understand what Kallari is, they are excited about purchasing the merchandise and often tell their friends.

We market our products to a diverse span of clients, from middle-school students to retired adults. We have received positive responses from everyone from rural residents to downtown shoppers, college students to Rotary members. Although I assumed that the market share would be from environmentalists, they are often more cautious about their purchases and many people who would not consider themselves "green" appreciate finding products that make them feel good about their purchase, instead of guilty.

How does the lifestyle you've chosen and your career affect your family? Are you married? Do you have kids? If you have a family or plan to start one, do they/would they live with you in the rainforest? What is life like for a displaced Kansas farm girl in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle?    -- Name not provided

I decided at a young age that the typical idealistic dream of marriage and family life was not for me. I am single, enjoy living in several different worlds at once, and am not willing to sacrifice any of my freedom. I do not think I could raise children as well as my parents did and still be such an important player in tropical conservation issues.

Are there opportunities to volunteer with your organization? Where would you recommend looking to find volunteer opportunities with environmental organizations in Latin America?    -- Michelle Blank, Boise, Idaho

Kallari depends upon international volunteers for most of our product and market development. We require that volunteers contribute at least three months of their time, but other than that are very flexible. The majority of our volunteers find us through internet links for volunteer organizations, or by doing general searches. Ecuador Explorer posts some volunteer opportunities in Ecuador and Green Volunteers is one of several books that include lists of volunteer positions worldwide.

How does someone without a background in environmental work switch careers to do something similar to what you are doing? What opportunities are there for volunteers in the Amazon?     -- Joanna Daly, Lake Peekskill, N.Y.

I really suggest that you try volunteering initially and use the experiences and contacts to build your resume, because the field of environmental work is very competitive in the U.S.

I began volunteering with the Jatun Sacha Foundation, but there are scores of environmental projects with volunteer programs just within Ecuador. The easiest way to find opportunities is to do a search on the internet and begin to get in touch with different programs that may offer the type of volunteer work you prefer to do. Kallari also offers volunteer positions, but we require a three-month commitment, nearly three times the minimum time commitment requested by other organizations.

See above for more information on how to research volunteer positions worldwide.

I've been trying to break into the nonprofit world for about a year now. I've been told my resume is great and my interview skills are good, but I've had no bites. Any advice you have on getting into the environmental field here in the states would be greatly appreciated!    -- Michelle Corey Brown, Spotsylvania, Va.

I think the easiest way to get a job at a nonprofit organization is to begin volunteering and create a position for yourself. If you volunteer for a short amount of time and the organization recognizes how valuable your work ethic, skills, contacts, or experience are, they will find a way to keep you.

Another way is to simply keep yourself posted on part-time openings and try to get your foot in the door by taking a small position and letting them know how much more you could do for them in a full-time post.

I was fortunate to have quite a bit of field experience, which opened doors to research positions. However, I think that currently anyone with skills in development, i.e., writing grants or managing campaigns to aquire private donations, is in big demand. You can go to the Foundation Center website and find their small information centers in large city libraries, or go to a course to find out more about this field. If you learn how to write grants or prepare projects, there are few nonprofit organizations that will not offer you a job.

I have a café in Cuenca, Ecuador, and would love to promote and serve fair-trade coffee there. What's your contact information in Ecuador?    -- Paul Murtha, Cold Brook, N.Y.

Our Quito coffee shop is located at Wilson and Juan Leon Mera, in the Mariscal sector (2-236-009). The Tena office of Kallari is at the corner of the Feria Libre, only two blocks east of the bus terminal (062-870-009).

I export a rainforest food called ramon, or capomo, from Mexico to the U.S. The Latin name of the tree it grows on is Brosimum alicastrum. This tree grows as far south as northern South America. Does it grow in Ecuador? If so, can I make some arrangement with you to create a collective to gather it for export?    -- Don Strachan, Middletown, Calif.

This species looks familiar and I think it is available in Ecuador, but am not sure about the availability of a quantity large enough to be shipped by freight. Please feel free to email me at the Kallari address: kallari@jatunsacha.org.

Can you recommend any books or internet resources with good information about the Amazon rainforest, its inhabitants, and its survival?    -- Name not provided

Savages, Neotropical Companion, Tropical Nature, and a collection of essays titled Tropical Rainforests. There are several more books available, which are probably more up-to-date; I simply don't have access to a great library in Ecuador.

Related Links:

More power, less roadkill: How one professor’s landscape has shifted

The risky plan to dump coal ash in an old Tennessee mine

Brazil’s Lula vows to slow rate of Amazon deforestation

Questions raised about influential conservation software

In recent years, many large conservation plans -- including the biggie that led Australia to ban fishing on a third of the Great Barrier Reef -- were produced using a computer program called Marxan. Now, Australian professor Hugh P. Possingham, who helped develop the program in 1998, is raising questions about it. In a recent study, Possingham found that unless plans generated by the program are implemented within a year -- a rare thing for plans of any size -- they are not as effective as the general rules of thumb conservationists used in the dark, primitive pre-software days. The problem, he said, is that big plans are often static, while environmental conditions and patterns of land ownership are not. Many conservationists took umbrage at Possingham's conclusions, noting that the sort of blueprints put out by the software help raise money for conservation. "If you think big and have a comprehensive plan and have a map in front of decision makers and donors," said Eric Dinerstein of the World Wildlife Fund, "you have a much better chance of generating the funds you need."

Related Links:

Obama takes on the anti-scientific delayers

How industry pressures and competing national agendas dim prospects for a climate treaty

Activists launch climate hunger strike