Worldcrunch
MAYDENA — Down below, ferns and moss thrive on the surrounding humidity. Higher up, they give way first to sassafras, then to giant eucalyptus trees that have been growing for centuries, here in the Upper Florentine Valley. This thick forest in the southern part of this Australian island was added last year to the Tasmanian […]
Not only is the Geysir geyser in southwestern Iceland one of the most impressive we’ve ever seen (sorry, Old Faithful …) but, as you may have guessed, it gave its name to the geological phenomenon.
The city of Sukhothai in central Thailand, which used to be the capital of the ancient Siam Empire, is now in ruins. I went digging for this slide a couple weeks ago after I saw an image of this same buddha’s head being “swallowed” by a banyan tree on a French television reportage about Thai […]
It’s no wonder Pretoria is known as The Jacaranda City. The streets lined with thousands of jacaranda trees are definitely a sight worth seeing. The beautiful purple blooms tend to coincide with year-end exams at the University of Pretoria, and legend has it that if a flower drops on a student’s head, it’s a sign […]
BOGOTA — With the expansion of Chiribiquete National Natural Park, Colombia’s National System of Protected Areas has gone a long way to preserve an additional 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) of Amazonian jungle. The importance of this new area is not difficult to measure. In those 27,800 square kilometers of jungle located between Guaviare […]
Considered the ugliest of them all, frogs are far more helpful to the environment than cuddly kittens or charming princes. It’s time to start showing some serious amphibian amour!
ÜBERLINGEN AM BODENSEE — Nadja Schotthöfer and David Schuster decided against the German Dream — a semi-detached house with garden, flat-screen TV, living room suite, fitted kitchen. They live in a yurt, where their child was born. Outside, a warm wind caresses the tall grasses, and it smells like hay drying in the sun. The […]
BERLIN – Chances are, you don’t know anyone with professional interests quite like biologist Heike Reise. She and her colleagues at Germany’s Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Görlitz are studying the sex life of slugs, also known as “naked snails” for their lack of shells. Every year the scientists catch and observe primarily field […]
GENEVA – He quotes Mahatma Gandhi and wears the traditional Indian dress, but Arun Krishnamurthy is not living in the past. On the contrary, it is his desire to build a better future that led him to give up a promising career at Google and create an organization to help fight environmental degradation in his […]
AMBOSELI TRUST FOR ELEPHANTS (Kenya), AAP (Australia) Worldcrunch They say elephants never forget. We humans don’t either. When the Amboseli Trust for Elephants organization in Kenya learned of a baby elephant calf stuck in a 1.5-meter well somewhere on the savannah, there was only one thing to do: Jump in the SUV, hurtle toward the […]