By Russell Johnson
GLOBAL WARMING CAUSES EXTINCTIONS

VIDEO (FLASH)
AUDIO MP3

VIEWS OF COSTA RICA 

VIDEO (Windows Media - MP4 (iTunes)
HDTV (Windows Media HD 98MB)
(Do not try to download HDTV unless you a 3.0 Pentium or above
with Windows Media Player 10 and a fast Cable or DSL Connection)

Souvenirs. When you travel, you both take them and leave them. I think about this as I sit on my deck at home scraping Costa Rican mud off of my boots. Who knows what is in this stuff: maybe anteater scat, or some seeds dropped from the bill of a three-wattled bellbird that will plant themselves in my garden, thrive and perhaps (oh dear) eat my cat.

I took a hike through Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud forest with Danilo Wallace, a park ranger born and raised in what is now one of the world's foremost rainforest preserves. He said that when he was a child he shot Toucans with a slingshot, cut off their bills and made necklaces. For his parents, the forest was a servant, from which they extracted building materials and food. That has changed.

I am lucky enough to occasionally work on a project that is both interesting and makes me feel good. Last summer I was one of the consultants who helped create and communicate a strategy for developing sustainable tourism in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia. I first became involved with the Mekong in 1996 when I traveled to Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (or Burma), Thailand, Vietnam and Yunnan Province, China to develop media for videos, books, websites and the like. The latest project, with the sponsorship of the Asian Development Bank, outlines a strategy that aims to reduce poverty by targeting economically-depressed areas, managing the adverse social impacts that tourism can have, particularly the exploitation of women and children and protecting and promoting both the natural and cultural heritages of the region. The ADB says that the strategy could help raise more than a million people out of extreme poverty by 2015. It is an ambitious plan that, happy to say, was approved by all six governments. Here is a short documentary I made on The Mekong Tourism Strategy. It is not a travelogue but demonstrates how travel and tourism has as much potential to improve nature and humankind as it does to destroy it and that there a lot of people around the world trying to make it happen.

WINDOWS MEDIA
MP4 (IPOD)

Sedona, Arizona - Batik Paints, Bali
Audio-MP3
Story & Photos (c)Russell Johnson

I am at the dump with a truckload of...STUFF: a rusty old Weber barbecue with a missing wheel, two CD players that cost more to fix than replace, a typewriter table (remember those?), old tax receipts, and souvenirs, boxes of worthless STUFF that is given or sent to me because I am a travel writer and therefore deemed an easy mark for bribery.

Our municipal dump is a tourist destination in itself, a theme park dedicated to crud. You queue up with your truck (my borrowed '72 Toyota rustbucket) behind a bunch of other trucks and you inch along a road lined on both sides with salvaged discards. Lots of concrete cherubs with missing parts, garden gnomes, ceramic pigs.a flock of lawn flamingoes: a Disney jungle ride through Doo Dah Land.