Last night I attended an inspiring benefit for The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) organized by Be Stirred, and while the party was way up in the Hills of Beverly, ACT president Dr. Mark Plotkin, illustrated how closely tied we all are to the Amazon.   ACT partners with indigenous tribes to preserve the biodiversity, health and culture in tropical America, which not only protects the forest and it’s inhabitants, but empowers them as well.  We had the unique opportunity to meet a shaman from a tribe in Suriname who has worked closely with Dr. Plotkin, and shared with us his appreciation for the program.  Using Google Earth, the organization has trained tribes to map their land, protecting large territories from encroaching nefarious activities, such as deforestation, mining and drug trafficking.  Other programs help to document cultural and medicinal traditions to ensure the information is passed on to future generations.

Click on the image below to learn more from ACT’s video overview and takepart by supporting The Amazon Conservation Team.

A few months back, I wrote about the unexpectedly welcome news that President Bush asked his cabinet for a plan to protect the waters around some of the most remote islands in the Pacific Ocean, including the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on earth.  We read that, and we thought, “Huh.  That’s pretty awesome.  We’ll put this one in the win column for this administration.”

Aaaaaannnnnd…not so fast.  There are objections to the plan.  And, not from the most helpful of places.  Richard Dreyfuss The Penguin Vice President Dick Cheney is not onboard with this idea, at all.  The Washington Post reports (and, yes, sorry about the cheap dig at the Vice President…they’re not even original jokes, and all joking aside, I have heard he’s a nice man, in person):

Vice President Cheney and some officials in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands have argued that the plan could hurt the region’s economy by barring fishing and energy exploration.

Ah, yes.  Money.  It always comes down to money.

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What is Earth Day?  Let these top 10 eco-heroes guide you to a better understanding of what it means to love Mother Nature and all it’s inhabitants.   These folks take first place in history for their dedication to bringing about awareness and action when it comes to our natural world. If this top 10 sampling from Newsweek’s excellent expose on patron saints of the environment isn’t enough to whet your eco-appetite, check out these 90+ more green campaigners from the Guardian UK. Happy (early) Earth Day!

1) John Muir is often referred to as the “father of national parks, and he helped Theodore Roosevelt to create Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainer, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon national parks. He also founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and served as president until his death in 1914.

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Looks like green is the new purple in royal circles these days; Prince Albert of Monaco is following in Prince Charles’ royally restrained carbon footprint and using his princely powers to promote sustainability through the Prince Albert II Foundation. Albert created the foundation to support “projects and solutions for the environment” and promote “sustainable and equitable management of natural resources.”

Prince Albert’s foundation recently honored three individuals for their outstanding contributions in the fields of climate change, biodiversity and water, as TreeHugger reported yesterday:

Alain Hubert, the Belgian explorer and co-founder of the International Polar Foundation, won in the Climate Change category. Jane Goodall won in Biodiversity for her life-long commitment and pioneering research into chimpanzee behavior, which has transformed scientific perceptions of the relationship between humans and animals. Finally, Sunita Narain, the writer and environmental campaigner, received the Water Award for her work highlighting the need for water security and the use of rainwater harvesting in India.

Now, if I could just compile a list of eight more ecologically righteous royals, I could do a Top 10 Monarchs Who Make A Difference post.

Learn more about the Prince Albert II Foundation’s efforts on behalf of biodiversity, climate change, and water here.

More and more people are substituting nature-based recreational activities for indoor ones, like watching television and surfing the web. Does less contact with nature mean less concern for the conservation of the environment and national parks? Researchers reported on Monday that camping, fishing and per capita visits to parks were on the decline:

“Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts,” wrote co-authors Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic of the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We think it probable than any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation.”

Countries like Japan have also been experiencing declines in visits to national parks, which have dropped 18 percent between 1991 and 2005. Nature.org spoke with Pergams and Zaradic about their study, and discussed whether or not their findings mean that people are losing interest in nature. Check out the interview>>

by Kerry Trueman

You’d think that Iowa’s corn farmers would be doing cartwheels in their fields after harvesting a bumper crop this season and getting top dollar for it, thanks to the ethanol boom. But as the Washington Post reports today, corn farmers have reaped an earful of bad PR along with those 420 billion or so ears of corn.

The phrase “corn-fed” sounds like a dis, now, thanks to corn’s starring role as the villain in Michael Pollan’s best selling The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the documentary King Corn, both of which lay the blame for our corroded food chain on all those amber waves of grain.

The ethanol bandwagon’s hit a pothole, too, now that the downside of ratcheting up corn production for fuel is getting more press. As Jerry Schnoor, a University of Iowa professor of civil and environmental engineering, told the Washington Post, “The environmental constraints are just too great. It’s too much nutrients, too much soil loss, too much pesticides. We don’t have the land.”

Corn fields already cover 14 million acres in Iowa, more than a third of the state’s surface. As the Washington Post notes, “Tens of thousands of acres in Iowa once set aside for conservation were plowed this year for corn. The Iowa landscape is a patchwork of corn and soybean monocultures, with about as much biodiversity as a bachelor’s refrigerator.”

Yes, and with just about as much nutrition. But as long as Americans remain addicted to soda, fast food and the promise of “cheap” fuel, corn will continue to rule. Crunch all you want. They’ll plant more.