GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES EXTINCTIONS

Souvenirs. When you travel, you both take them and leave them. I think about this as I sit on my deck at home scraping Costa Rican mud off of my boots. Who knows what is in this stuff: maybe anteater scat, or some seeds dropped from the bill of a three-wattled bellbird that will plant themselves in my garden, thrive and perhaps (oh dear) eat my cat.

I took a hike through Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud forest with Danilo Wallace, a park ranger born and raised in what is now one of the world's foremost rainforest preserves. He said that when he was a child he shot Toucans with a slingshot, cut off their bills and made necklaces. For his parents, the forest was a servant, from which they extracted building materials and food. That has changed.

I am lucky enough to occasionally work on a project that is both interesting and makes me feel good. Last summer I was one of the consultants who helped create and communicate a strategy for developing sustainable tourism in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia. I first became involved with the Mekong in 1996 when I traveled to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (or Burma), Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province, China to develop media for videos, books, websites and the like.