The Mayan expression Quauhtitlan, meaning "between the trees," gave the name to what is now Guatemala. With more than 30 legally declared protected areas, and 40 more proposed, Guatemala boasts some of the richest biodiversity in the world: 19 ecosystems, over 300 microclimates, 400 species of birds, a myriad of snakes, wild cats, and monkeys, and thousands of species of tropical trees and plants–many of which are threatened by illegal burning and harvesting.
When it comes to talking about the "green car," electric vehicles, or EVs. get all the glory. And no wonder! The $30,000 state-of-the-art General Motors EV1, formerly the Impact, will roll out in Saturn dealerships this fall. Chyrsler will be marketing an electric minivan, as will Honda. And Toyota’s RAV4 is the first plug-in sport utility vehicle.
If you visited participating McDonald’s between June 14 and July 11, your $1.99 Happy Meal burger/fries/drink combo also included the opportunity to take home a plump, plush Babe figure, or one of six other characters from last summer’s blockbuster movie.
Untouched by the last glacier, southwestern Wisconsin is hilly, wooded and wild–home to Old Order Amish, back-to-the land homesteaders and third-generation dairy farmers. On weekends, tourists from Madison, Milwaukee and Minneapolis come to canoe the picturesque and crooked Kickapoo River.
With a world population of less than 1,000, the future of the California Red-legged Frog (Rana aurora draytonni) looked bleak. The poor frog was beset by habitat destruction, harvesting, predation by non-native species (bullfrog, bluegill, mosquitofish), and drought. Things only grew worse when, in 1995, Congress voted a moratorium on any new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listing of endangered or threatened species.
How would you like to be a worm for a day? Or have refuse dumped on your head? Such things happen when people visit garbage museums, interactive learning centers that teach kids why "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is an important philosophy for the 1990s.
Any environmentalist will say education is the key to building a green society. But The Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia is incorporating that idea into its curriculum.
Four hundred years ago, according to legend, Spanish mustangs swam from shipwrecks to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Today, untamed descendants of these horses still run free in small herds along Shackleford Banks, an undeveloped island off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina.
Rameshwari Devi sits in front of a pit of smoldering coal, roasting shoes. Plumes of acrid smoke rise from the oven as the plastic soles begin to melt. She coughs incessantly as she strips the soles and tosses them in a heap, discarding the leather uppers.
Saving for the future is not a new idea. But one family in Austin, Texas has put a new twist on meeting their water needs. With a homebuilt water barn, Michael McElveen and his wife, Kathy, now use rainwater to satisfy all their water needs for drinking, irrigating their organic garden and orchard, and supplying their fish pond and swimming pool.
