Graduate student Martha Ruhe had no intention of making the botanical garden along the Washington D.C. Mall a "Disneyland Garden."

When Ruhe, a student of landscape architecture at Penn State, entered the competition to redesign the 3.2-acre site southwest of the Capitol, she ignored suggestions to represent everything from the pine glades of the Northeast to the bogs of the South. "It was a peculiar cross-section for an area and a climate like Washington D.C.," she said. "It would be altering and adjusting in a very false way."

"Having transcended its mountain home to become a citizen of the world, the panda is a symbolic creature that represents our efforts to protect the environment. Though dumpy and bearlike, it has been patterned with such creative flourish, such artistic perfection, that it almost seems to have evolved for this purpose. A round, rather flat face, large black eye patches, and a cuddly and clumsy appearance give the panda an innocent, childlike quality that evokes universal empathy, a desire to hug and protect. And it is rare. Survivors are somehow more poignant than casualties.

While some wildlife ecologists are fighting to save the seals, the eagles, or the manatees, Richard Yahner and Betsie Balcom are saving the rats.

The Allegheny woodrat—a grayish brown rodent more mouselike than its name suggests—has been rapidly disappearing from the deciduous forests of the northeastern United States. In less than two decades, the woodrat has vanished entirely from New York, has declined quickly in Pennsylvania, and has been reduced to only one colony in New Jersey.

Fifty-five million years ago, during the Eocene epoch, Earth underwent a warming more pronounced than any other on record. The average global temperature rose by 1 to 4 degrees C. Palm trees and alligators flourished within the Arctic circle. Researchers point to a greenhouse effect as the cause of this warming—an excess of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not unlike the situation we may face in the coming century. But what could have caused such an imbalance so long before humans and their combustion engines?

"It would take us four, maybe five hours to hike to the crater," Barry Voight remembers. "Then to get into position which meant going up and around and down the other side.

"There were places we had to rappel.

"It's not impossible to go up and down the volcano, it's just a question of—

"The weather conditions are such that you don't have the whole day to work with.

"You have a couple of hours. It's not a big deal."

When a certain operation is applied to the numbers, the ones outside the set flee to infinity. The numbers inside remain to drift or dance about. Close to the boundary minutely choreographed wanderings mark the onset of the instability. . . .

"Things go on this way forever, infinitely various and frighteningly lovely."

"Perhaps one in 10 to one in 20 species in the tropics are known to science. How can conservation work in the face of this degree of ignorance? How can economic development be guided in a more benign direction?"

—Thomas E. Lovejoy of the World Wildlife Fund (1986)

"We should need little reminder of Francis Bacon's insight: ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.' To keep development in harmony with natural forces and resources, we must apply that lesson on the largest scale—from the planning stage through the execution of every project."—Barber Conable, President of the World Bank (1986)