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Environmental Preservation

Kitchen with stove and oven of a Roman inn (Mansio) at the Roman villa of Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany

Green Your Kitchen

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Up in Smoke

Amazon research that has withstood thieves and arsonists now faces its greatest challenge

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Mountain Messengers

Scientists scale peaks and study plants to understand the impact of warming

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Roots of the Sea

What mangroves give the world and why we can’t afford to lose them

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Ground Thaw

Geographer Christopher Burn explains why permafrost is thawing

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Dreaming of a Green Christmas

Making Your Holiday Tree Eco-Friendly

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A Prayer for the Ganges

Across India, environmentalists battle a tide of troubles to clean up a river revered as the source of life

Rakesh Jaiswal

India in Peril

Rakesh Jaiswal, founder of ecofriends.org, talks about the country’s growing list of environmental problems

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Midas Touch

To clean highly polluted groundwater, Michael Wong has developed a detergent based on gold

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Water Works

Taking up the family business, Philippe Cousteau campaigns to save our oceans and rivers

"The basic question was, What can Mozambique do to build its economy?" says Carr, in Gorongosa Park. His answer: eco-tourism.

Greg Carr’s Big Gamble

In a watershed experiment, the Boston entrepreneur is putting $40 million of his own money into a splendid but ravaged park in Mozambique

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EcoCenter: Greener Living

Smithsonian.com takes a look at common and easy ways to go green

Although Brazil protected indigenous territories in the 1980s, many miners and loggers ignore Native boundaries; they see cultural mapping as a threat.

Rain Forest Rebel

In the Amazon, researchers documenting the ways of native peoples join forces with a chief to stop illegal developers from destroying the wilderness

Soda bottles make up the bulk of the construction of a 3,500-liter cistern that Andreas Froese (pictured) and schoolchildren built in Roatan, Honduras. When filled with sand, the bottles become nearly indestructible.

Waste Into Walls: Building Casas Out of Sand

A green technology guru heads to the dump in search of the stuff of dreams

Nature Works has figured out how to make plastic out of corn.

Corn Plastic to the Rescue

Wal-Mart and others are going green with “biodegradable” packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America’s throwaway culture?

Raymond Tritt, 52, dresses a fallen bull on the spring caribou hunt. Like virtually every Gwich'in man, he still remembers every detail of his first successful hunt, four decades later. The 100,000-plus caribou of the Porcupine River herd are a focal point for the Gwich'in people: they are a main source of sustenance as well as the key element in the group's rituals, dances and stories. "If we lose the caribou," says a tribal elder, "we lose our way of life."

ANWR: The Great Divide

The renewed debate over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge hits home for the two Native groups nearest the nature preserve

A growing number of U.S. firms dismantle used computers and send valuable parts (Circuit Boards #2, New Orleans, 2005) to companies that glean the semiprecious metals.

E-Gad!

Americans discard more than 100 million electronic devices each year. As “e-waste” piles up, so does concern about this growing threat to the environment

"These are my husband's friends. They went hunting one day and came back empty-handed.." - Jin Shenghua, 24 Xuehua village

Visions of China

With donated cameras, residents of remote villages document endangered ways of life, one snapshot at a time

Legal challenges from environmental groups over a two-year period stymied the efforts of ranger Kate Klein (a mile from her station) to thin a forest tract by commercial logging. A catastrophic fire broke out just days after she prepared a final rebuttal.

Fire Fight

With forests burning, U.S. officials are clashing with environmentalists over how best to reduce the risk of catastrophic blazes

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Where the Wild Things Are

President Theodore Roosevelt started what would become the world’s most successful experiment in conservation

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