Word: valleys
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than a decade Rabinowitz has traveled back and forth from Burma - which the junta now calls Myanmar - meeting with everyone from high-level generals in the former capital of Yangon to local rebels in jungle camps, all in a painstaking effort to create and preserve the Hukawng Valley Wildlife Sanctuary...
Rabinowitz makes clear just how painful the process was in his new book, Life in the Valley of Death. (Watch Alan Rabinowitz talk about the Hukawng Valley reserve, and the changing nature of wildlife conservation, on the new video Greencast.) First there was the forbidding Hukawng Valley itself, a remote chunk of mountainous jungle on the border with India, dubbed the "Valley of Death" by British refugees fleeing the Japanese advance into Burma during World War II. When Rabinowitz hiked deep into the Hukawng in 1999 - braving carnivorous leeches, among other trials - he was the first scientist to visit...
...wide in their habitats, if you can stake out enough land to protect them, you'll also be protecting all the smaller animals that occupy the lower rungs of the food chain. (It's called the "apex protection" strategy.) Tigers will likely always remain endangered in the Hukawng Valley, but turning the area into a well-protected reserve would safeguard one of the world's great remaining biodiversity hotspots...
...fastest way to start a fistfight among environmentalists is to bring up the topic of biofuels - plant-based liquid fuels like ethanol that could potentially take the place of petroleum. Biofuel revolutionaries - like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla - see plant power as a way to break America's dependence on foreign oil, and produce auto fuel that doesn't kill the climate. Opponents dismiss biofuels - most of which are currently distilled from crops like corn and sugar cane - as a blind alley, one that drives up food prices without saving the earth...
...travel up the Rift valley, the scale and fury of Kenya's southern division becomes ever more apparent. We enter a village called Kamosong, and 15 men surround the car. One is carrying a foot-long knife, another a hockey stick, a third a bow and arrow, a fourth a wooden club. A man who introduces himself as Thomas tells us the men are from the Kalenjin tribe of former President Daniel Arap Moi. "Have you got anyone in the back?" they ask Preston. "What's your name? Are you Kikuyu?" A few minutes further on, there is another roadblock...