There were limits to how green Bruce Letvin was willing to go. For years, the 53-year-old anatomy professor had wanted to install solar panels on his Manhattan Beach, Calif., home. But the up-front installation costs always outweighed the benefits for the environment and his conscience. This spring, however, he managed to work out green financing with the help of solar company SunPower.
Eight kinds of beer and freshly shucked oysters make the Innamincka Hotel an oasis for travelers on Australia's remote Strzelecki Track. But keeping food and drink cold in the Outback isn't cheap. Every three weeks a diesel tanker must make a 1,600-km round trip from Port Augusta, South Australia, to keep the generators running.
Early last year, the bush storyteller Murray Hartin penned a 14-stanza poem in three hours flat. Rain From Nowhere is about a farmer on the brink of ruin who receives an empathetic letter from his father. A celebration of resilience and hope, it is as moving a piece of Australian verse as has been published in decades. It's also pertinent.
The highway leading to Yingxiu, a small town near the epicenter of China's May 12 earthquake, is rent by fissures big enough to swallow a child and is choked with smashed trucks and enormous rocks. Near the town's outskirts, just past a compact car that has been crushed by a boulder, a landslide cuts off the road entirely.
The people of Burma take omens seriously. For centuries, the paths of planets and vagaries of weather have been scrutinized by astrologers, who divine a relationship between celestial irregularities and earthly mayhem.
At around 5 p.m. on April 2, local police and officers from the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation descended on a four-story warehouse in suburban Manila. They were acting on a tip-off about possible illicit activity. But the agents weren't searching for drugs or knockoff Rolexes. They were looking for rice.
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon.
High winds on the last day of this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos prevented me from taking my usual run from the top of the Weissfluhjoch to Klosters, thinking on the way of what I'd learned during the week. I wasn't too upset.
Maybe it happened the day after Hurricane Katrina or the night Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, but the first phase of the global-warming debate has ended. Even Skeptic-in-Chief George W. Bush recently convened a global-warming summit, where Condoleezza Rice told foreign diplomats that "climate change is a real problem--and human beings are contributing to it."
Flat strips of lush, submerged grass rise in terraces from the courtyard of Sidwell Friends' new middle school in Washington like rice paddies in a mountainous Chinese village. Part of a man-made wetland connected to the school's water system, the plants filter liquid waste, just as real wetlands do with rainwater.
