July 17, 2008 | Pulitzer Center
Donate Now Michael Stoll, for the Pulitzer Center
Guatemala City, Guatemala
This morning I flew to Guatemala City with half a dozen officials and NGO representatives from the Guatemalan state of Petén.
They were all rushing to the capital for an impromptu meeting with President Álvaro Colóm, who is unveilling a proposal that he says will promote forest conservation on a grand scale. There have been numerous initiatives, but nothing seems to be able to adequately protect the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a United Nations-inspired patchwork of protected areas created in 1990 that covers the northern half of the state. But nearly two decades later, only about 70 percent of the original forest cover remains ...