Word: forester
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...king of the mountain. This year's celebration began on Feb. 20 with a three-hour climb to the summit. Women in white silk saris danced and sang, adorned with wooden jewelry, flowers and tiny knives tucked into their hair as a reminder of their daily confrontation with the forest. Hundreds of Dongria then shared a communal feast of rice and lentils in honor of nature and their deity, the spirit of Niyamgiri. As always, they made offerings of fruit and medicinal plants, reminders of the mountain's bounty, but ended the ceremonies with an acknowledgement of their uncertain future...
...isolated tribe of nature-worshipping forest dwellers threatened by a mine - yes, the Dongria bear no small resemblance to the Na'vi of James Cameron's Avatar. That point has not been lost on the international network of activists who have taken up the Dongria's cause. On Feb. 8, they ran an advertisement in the Hollywood trade publication Variety urging Cameron to support them. "Avatar is fantasy ... and real," the ad said. "The Dongria Kondh tribe in India are struggling to defend their land against a mining company hell-bent on destroying their sacred mountain. Please help the Dongria...
Even Costa Rica's vaunted green luster has begun to brown. Its rain-forest protection and ecotourism are still envied in the Americas; Chinchilla says she's committed to Arias' goal of making the country carbon-neutral by 2021. But Arias has been accused of lax national-parks preservation and pandering to open-pit mining ventures in Costa Rica...
...invasive species like the Rocky Mountain pine beetle, which has ravaged trees from Colorado to Montana, cause an estimated $120 billion worth of damage annually. "Invasives take over the habitat that native species need to survive and persist," says Frank Lowenstein, director of the Nature Conservancy's (TNC) Forest Health program and an expert on invasive species. "Eventually invasives just start replacing natives...
...Another factor contributing to the devastation was the outdated warning scheme then used throughout the country. The Forest Fire Danger Index (FDI), invented by scientist Alan McArthur in the 1960s, evaluates the difficulty in extinguishing fires under various combinations of temperature and wind. For most of years since it's been used, an FDI warning of 50 out of 100 points indicated that an area was at extreme risk. But in recent years, there have been many days where the index has hovered around the 100 mark, a shift some attribute to climate change. On Feb. 7, when...