Editor's Note

One perk of editing a magazine is sharing personal passions with readers. About 20 years ago I made my first trip to Opal Creek, one of the last  islands of old-growth forest left in the continental United States and just two hours from Portland, Oregon, to report on the spotted owl conflict then raging in the Northwest. I’ve returned many times since as a writer and in recent years as a board member of the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center. Last spring I dispatched a regular Audubon contributor, Jane Braxton Little, there to participate in one of the center’s amphibian workshops. Finding many of the 15 frogs and salamanders surviving in Opal Creek’s sanctuary (including a rough-skinned newt like the orange-bellied beauty on our cover) filled Jane with awe and fear—for their future (see “A Rare Jewel”). “Seldom seen and rarely acclaimed, amphibians are the planet’s canaries in a coal mine,” she writes. “At a time when scientific assessments are predicting their catastrophic decline worldwide [largely from global warming], Opal Creek’s population is increasing awareness of the role these animals play.”

Breathing room for amphibians and humans alike is simply shrinking. In “Sin City Goes Dry,” Ted Williams reports on the “grow or die” philosophy behind Las Vegas’s vast diversion of water, which “threatens to extinguish life-forms,” including almost two dozen federally threatened bird species. Meanwhile, “Scarface,” Cameron Davidson’s photo essay, documents the devastation of forested mountains in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee from mountaintop-removal coal mining. To Davidson, the lesson is clear: “Until we make a commitment to conservation, and to alternative energy sources, we’re going to be getting coal out of the ground.”

Water and energy conservation can take many forms, starting at your dinner table. Senior Editor Rene Ebersole writes about a new model of sustainable cuisine taking place at the Rockefeller estate north of New York City, where a thriving farm, education center, and gourmet restaurant promote the “virtues of supporting sustainable farming and the pleasures of eating foods grown and raised without chemicals or hormones in close proximity to where they’re consumed” (see “Happy Meals”). This cuts down on the use of the pesticides and herbicides that kill 67 million birds each year and reduces the greenhouse gases emitted during food transport, which contribute to global warming. All of which goes to show that we can have our cake and save the earth, too.—David Seideman