Word: palau
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...their ocher-colored car coats and slinging toy kangaroos into the crowd, the Australians basked in the warmest applause. But beyond the nationalism there was much goodwill - toward the four athletes from East Timor, parading for the first time since their homeland's independence, as were teams from Eritrea, Palau and Micronesia. Even more stirring was the standing ovation given to the North and South Korean athletes, who, although they will compete separately, marched together in support of reunification. After all, said a North Korean official earlier in the week, "we are the same blood...
Palauans have always lived from the sea, but it was not until the mid-'80s that overfishing became a problem. After a half-century as a U.S. trust territory, Palau was preparing for independence in 1994--and promoting commercial fishing for export as a way of earning a living...
Raised in Ngiwal, a fishing village on Palau's largest island, Babeldaob, Idechong had his eyes opened to nature's riches only when he left for a year of high school in the U.S. in 1970. He spent that period amid the lakes and forests around Pine City, Minnesota--"one of the best times of my life"--and realized that "wildlife was the field I wanted...
...went to college in Hawaii and then returned to Palau, where he started working for the government. In 1994 he founded the Palau Conservation Society, the archipelago's only homegrown non-governmental organization. He has traveled to Britain, Canada, Italy, the Solomon Islands and Fiji to study, but Idechong has never strayed too far from his village roots. Every time he begins a conservation program, his first instinct is to confer with the village elders. He is now starting to focus on ways of protecting the dugong (sea cow) and the hawksbill turtle, both of which are vulnerable to fishermen...
Idechong is not done with his worrying, though. As the government plans to build roads, golf courses and more hotels to boost tourism, he sees more dangers on the horizon for the country's ecosystem. "Palau right now needs visionaries--people who can say what they want Palau to look like 50 years from now, and what we must do now to make that happen." In other words, more people with Idechong's kind of vision...