Takashi Shida bent down in a field of soy beans, briefly disappearing in the sea of pea green stalks that swelled off toward the flat horizon. Surfacing again, he brandished a plant better than a yard long. He grasped it firmly and, as if playing
TOME-ACU, Brazil–Every evening, when work was done at the farmer’s cooperative, Noburo Sakaguchi would drive home to his small plot of land a few miles out of Tome-Acu, an agricultural village in the eastern Brazilian Amazon region. Sakaguchi, an agronomist by schooling but a woodsman
SERINGAL CACHOEIRA, BRAZIL–It doesn’t look much like a battlefield. A huddle of wooden huts raised on stilts crowns a grassy knoll. Tidy dirt paths stitch the way between the houses. Lush orange trees dot the hill, throwing deep shadows, and at the crest, a pair
LOST HILLS, Calif.–On a recent May afternoon when the temperature was toying with triple digits, Dr. Joseph Skorupa, a federal wildlife biologist looking for bird eggs, walked a low earthen levee between two vast pools of shallow water. With light-colored clothing and a broad-brimmed hat,
SEATTLE–It was a disaster. The banks of Seattle’s Duwamish River were covered with carcasses of adult salmon returning to spawn. Jaws open, eyes intact, thousands of dead fish had been in the mud for twenty hours undisturbed by the myriad of birds which, under normal
