Vacation Here Before Climate Change Sets In

Explore Patagonia
One of the attractions are its dramatic icebergs. But this mountain region is gradually becoming a soggy lake district instead, as this Greenpeace photo illustrates.

	Patagonian Mountain Lake

It's still possible to cruise through this region in Argentina and Chile to see glaciers and their penguin citizenry. But five years ago, NASA was reporting that these ice fields were responsible for 10% of the rise in ocean levels from mountain glaciers, and were melting at an accelerated rate. Patagonia glaciers are of a sort that is more sensitive to climate change than others because of the way they melt, the agency says.

Take a gander at them before tourists need to trade hiking boots for swimsuits.

Visit the Amazon
It isn't climate change that's doing in this Brazilian rainforest and all of its important biodiversity; its industrial farming.

Commercial farming accounts for a small portion of the overall forest loss, but it's responsible for much of the recent clearing as Brazil vies with the US to be the world's largest exporter of soybeans.

Researchers estimate that Brazil accounts for half of the tropical deforestation that occurred between 2000 and 2005. And recent reports estimate that an area roughly the size of Los Angeles was cleared all at once earlier this year.

What do we stand to lose by bending machetes into plowshares? We don't entirely know, and that's the point.

The Amazon is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. One out of every ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon, and we haven't yet discovered all the plant, animal and insect life that calls it home.