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There are two important things to know about tracking wild elephants, and it's better to learn both of them before you're actually in the jungle, tracking wild elephants. First, elephants are fast. In thick forest - in this case, the vast Ulu Masen ecosystem in the Indonesian province of Aceh, where leeches writhe beneath your feet and white-handed gibbons hoot from the treetops - they can outpace even deer. Second, elephants can't climb trees. This is good, because that's precisely what you're meant to do if one of them charges...
...companies trying to meet their U.N. emissions-reduction targets. The revenue produced by the sale of credits is then ploughed back into protecting the forest and improving life in communities living along its edge, thereby giving people a reason to leave the trees standing. In other words, forests are better REDD than dead. (See the top 10 animals stories...
...farmers in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to stop them destroying the forest for agriculture. But with 120,000 households around Ulu Masen, even a multimillion-dollar sale of carbon credits might amount to only $100 to $200 a year per family, estimates Linkie. The money might be better pooled to build schools, bridges or other projects that would benefit the entire community. However it is distributed, a very clear message must be sent to the local communities, says Linkie: "You're getting this [money] because you're not cutting down the forest...
...siege of Mumbai, but its failures - to heed early warnings or secure the city's borders - were just as galling. So perhaps it was with a villager's stubborn pride that I thought Mumbai, a high-octane, rough-and-tumble metropolis, would become a kinder, gentler and altogether better place to live and work in the wake of 11/26. (See pictures of the first two days of attacks in Mumbai...
...Certainly that's what the city's residents demanded, and what officialdom pledged. More than the ubiquitous candlelight vigils, the anger and frustration that I heard from ordinary people in Mumbai, and later in India's other big cities, seemed new. They resolved to demand more from their politicians - better services and real accountability - and from themselves. Instead of just dusting themselves off and getting back to work, many promised to complain less, volunteer more and take the trouble to vote. Swati Ramanathan, whose Bangalore-based group Janaagraha led an ambitious national voter-registration drive, told me shortly before...