The robot aircraft, which was designed by researchers in Australia and the
US, flew from Bell Island in Newfoundland to Benbecula in Scotland’s Outer
Hebrides in just over 26 hours, without human intervention. The plane has a
wingspan of around 3 metres, weighs 14 kilograms and carries weather
sensors.

Greg Holland of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, who was involved in the
project, says future versions of the aircraft will beam back weather information
via satellites. “We can deploy them in a tropical cyclone, in a severe
thunderstorm, anywhere,” he says. “By focusing on remote areas where we know
that observations are needed, this is expected to lead to quite substantial
weather prediction improvements.”

Alan Ellis and Jeremy Midgley, botanists at the University of Cape Town,
claim that the plant, Roridula, relies on a tiny bug living on its leaves to
digest its meals for it. The bug excretes a nourishing substance onto the
leaves, which the plant then absorbs.

The Roridula is a spectacular bushy plant up to 2 metres tall. It catches
insects in its sticky leaves so effectively that local people used to hang them
up in their houses as fly-catchers. It was first identified as carnivorous by
Charles Darwin more than 120 years ago, but since then its carnivorous
credentials have been questioned because of its lack of digestive enzymes.

Ellis and Midgley fed the plant with fruit flies raised on a diet of yeast.
The yeast had been enriched with an isotope of nitrogen that allowed the pair to
track the fate of the fruit flies once they had been killed by the plant. At
first their results were baffling: the nitrogen isotope rapidly disappeared from
the dead insects into the leaves as if the plant had digested the
prey—which was impossible as it possessed no digestive juices.

Then the botanists noticed that among the dead carcasses were living, healthy
hemipterans—a sort of carnivorous sapsucker that sucks out the juices of
other insects. They noticed that these bugs, Pameridea roridulae,
attacked any freshly caught prey and soon afterwards oozed urea onto the leaves.
They believe the Roridula then absorbs the urea, effectively using the
hemipteran as a “surrogate gut”. Their findings were reported in the latest
issue of Oecologia (vol 106, p 478).

“Roridula seems to be carnivorous in an indirect way,” says Midgley, who
believes it could be a missing link between ordinary and carnivorous plants. “It
is possibly a half way house in evolution.” Exactly how the hemipterans avoid
becoming stuck to the plant’s leaves is not known, but Midgley says their long
legs may help them to avoid the sticky hairs.

Barry Juniper, an expert in carnivorous plants at the University of Oxford,
suggests that other sticky-haired plants such as petunias, tobacco and some
species of potatoes, may also be semi-carnivorous. “They’re all killing
machines,” he says, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if they absorb decay products
from their prey.”

Juniper is intrigued by the way the hemipterans appear to be feeding the
Roridula. He says that many plants “lap up urea”, and that taking it through the
leaves as the Roridula does is much more efficient than absorbing it through the
roots.

Plants pollinated by bats tend to smell like garlic or rotten cabbage. But
Jette Knudsen and Lars Tollsten of the University of Gothenburg found that some
of these flowers smell of mushrooms.

The mushroom smell seems to be caused by eight-carbon fatty acids which the
flowers secrete. To investigate further, the researchers looked at the ecology
of two trees from Ecuador, the balsa treeOchroma pyramidale and another
species called Ceiba trischistandra. Both trees bloom during the dry
season, and the researchers conclude that the mushroom smell tricks the bats
into thinking that the flowers are a humid site where they can slake their
thirst (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, vol 119, p 45).
Alternatively, the fungal smell may attract bats looking for sugar. “Fungi can
signal rotten fruit,” says Tollsten, who has now moved to the laboratories of
Astra-Hässle, a pharmaceuticals company, also in Gothenburg.

Bat-pollinated flowers may not be unique in pretending to be damp and humid
places, Tollsten says. With Roman Kaiser of Givaudan-Roure Research, a perfume
and aroma company in DĂźbendorf, Switzerland, he has discovered that some
cacti, such as the Barbados gooseberry Pereskia aculeata, produce
flowers with a musty smell, due to aromatic compounds called geosmins
(Flavour and Fragrance Journal, vol 10, p 153). “These compounds are
produced by microorganisms living in damp environments,” explains Tollsten, “so
flowers which produce them might indicate a humid environment or shelter for
bees in the desert.”

A team led by C. Wells of the University of Alabama studied three species of
marigold. They boiled extracts from their roots, leaves and flowers, then
separated the individual chemicals using gas chromatography.

Wells and his colleagues found that all three species had insecticidal
properties, and that the flowers were the most potent part of each plant.
The Tagetes minutae species contained the most powerful insecticide.

The chemists found that several compounds in the plants were insecticidal,
including volatile chemicals called thiophenes. These killed the larvae and
adults of both Aedes aegyptii, the mosquito that carries the malaria
disease, and Anopheles stephensi, the mosquito responsible for carrying
yellow fever (Chromatographia, vol 35, p 209).

The market for marigold insecticide is promising because natural
insecticides are increasingly replacing synthetic ones, many of which have
been blamed for environmental damage. The best known natural insecticides
are the pyrethrins, extracted from the pyrethrum plant Chrysanthemum
cinerariaefolium. These are safe, and insects do not develop resistance to
them. Their impact on the environment is also very small because the
various ingredients break down into harmless chemicals. If the marigold
proves as efficient, the market for the flower’s insecticide could be
enormous, particularly in developing countries struggling to control malaria
and yellow fever.

Rapid movements in plants are unusual, partly because their cells have
cellulose walls which hold plants rigid when the cells are full of water.
But in contracting plants, the American researchers found, the cell walls
and the cuticle covering the outside of the stamens are very elastic. When
the stamens are touched, the cells lose water rapidly. And the drop in water
pressure causes the cells to collapse (Planta, vol 190, p 58 and American
Journal of Botany, vol 80, p 411).

Pesacreta and his colleagues do not know what makes the cell walls and
cuticle so elastic. Neither are they certain how the water inside the cells
is lost. But the tactile stamens behave like the touch-sensitive leaves of
Mimosa pudica. When their motor cells suddenly lose salts, water is drawn
out by osmosis. The causes the motor cells to collapse and the leaf bends.

The Mimosa’s movement may provide clues as how the stamens ‘feel’ the touch
of an insect. Touching Mimosa leaves triggers nerve-like electrical signals
that cause the motor cells to move. These signals can be mimicked by a mild
electric shock. Botanists have noted the same phenomenon in the
touch-sensitive and flexible stamens of the common garden shrubs Mahonia and
Berberis.

Experiments carried out in the past century demonstrated that cornflower
stamens shorten instantly when they are given a mild electric shock.
Pesacreta and his colleagues speculate that when cornflower stamens shorten,
it may be in response to electric signals triggered by the touch.

More than 100 species of flower use such movements, although cornflowers and
thistles are unique in contracting their stamens – shortening them by as
much as a third just two seconds after they are touched.

In common with their cousins, the conifers, cycads reproduce using cones
instead of flowers: female cones set seed with the aid of pollen which is
shed from male cones. The botany textbooks say that cycad cones are
pollinated with the aid of the wind, but this is not what one American
biologist has discovered. William Tang of the University of Miami at Coral
Gables says that cycads achieve fertilisation by heating up and attracting
insects.

Tang studied the cycad Zamia pumila. A male cycad cone is a succulent,
juicy, club-shaped organ. As it matures, it rapidly lengthens and the scales
that protect its pollen sacs break open. Tang found that at the time the
pollen sacs are revealed, a cone warms up noticeably – in some species, by
almost 5 °C. This is typical of flowers that are pollinated by
insects rather than the wind, so Tang examined the cones more closely. He
discovered that beetles were indeed visiting them.

To see whether the beetles were responsible for pollination, Tang put cones
in cages which shut out either the wind or the beetles. He found that the
cones were pollinated only when the beetles could get at them. In fact, the
cones heated up only in the late afternoon and evening when the beetles were
active. They gave off a sweet minty smell and oozed a nourishing,
nectar-like liquid which contained sugars and amino acids. The beetles liked
the cones so much that they often spent time copulating there (American
Journal of Botany, vol 74, p 90).

What makes this behaviour of cycads extraordinary is that the generation of
heat as a means of attracting insects was thought to be unique to the more
advanced flowering plants, such as Victoria water lilies and aroid lilies.
Like cycads, these plants use heat to vaporise ‘perfumes’ which attract
insects to pollinate the flowers.

The discovery of insect pollination in plants so far removed in evolution
from the flowering plants was a great surprise. But there were more shocks
to come. Tang found that cycads generate heat by using the same type of
chemical reactions as flowers.

As the cones gave off heat, their starch and fat content fell rapidly. Aroid
lilies such as the tropical voodoo lily function in the same way, burning up
so much starch and fat that their blooms shrink. Heating is expensive in
terms of energy, so the aroid lilies, like cycads, heat up just as the
flowers are ready for pollination. This is triggered by a surge of salicylic
acid through the bloom.

No one knows whether salicylic acid also synchronises the cycads’ heating.
But Tang, Hanna Skubatz and Bastiaan Meeuse also found that the cycads’
temperature tended to oscillate every few minutes, possibly to conserve
their energy supplies (Journal of Experimental Botany, vol 44, p 489).

Plants use ethylene to respond rapidly to dangers such as flooding or
wounding. The gas also makes flowers wither after pollination and ‘tells’
fruits when to ripen, making ethylene very important in horticulture. But
though in the past few years scientists have discovered how plants make the
hormone, until now virtually nothing has been discovered about how it works.

The effect of ethylene on plants has been known ever since scientists
noticed that trees downwind of gas streetlamps shed their leaves. But even
though the gas molecule has a very simple structure, its effect on plants
is complex. One problem in trying to unravel its effects is that it
interacts with many other plant hormones such as auxins.

Joseph Kieber and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia scored an important breakthrough after they screened more than
a million Arabidopsis seedlings. Among the seedlings they discovered mutant
plants which were unaffected by ethylene. Usually, seedlings curl their tips
when fed ethylene, but the mutants did not respond to either ethylene or
chemicals which inhibit ethylene, so their growth was stunted.

The researchers set out to discover why the mutants failed to respond. They
compared them with ordinary plants, and pinpointed a gene that was missing
from the mutant. After cloning it, they found that it encoded the enzyme
protein kinase, which adds a phosphate group to a protein.

This enzyme is a vital link in how the plant responds to ethylene, but it is
far from being the only link. When a hormone switches on a cell, it triggers
a chemical cascade, in which the protein kinase is only one part. Once the
protein kinase has done its work, another link in the relay is turned on,
and so the cascade continues until the cell changes its growth. But the
mutants, without this protein-phosphate complex, behaved as if they were
bombarded constantly by ethylene, so the seedlings became stunted.

What makes the work of Kieber’s group such a breakthrough is that it is the
first time anyone has identified a chemical link in the route which relays
signals from the hormone to the rest of the plant. Remarkably, the protein
kinase gene resembles those for similar enzymes in yeast, worms, fruitflies
and even people. It seems to suggest that there is a universal link in the
way all living things interpret their own chemical messengers.

Rooted to the spot, your average plant is socially challenged: how does
it find a partner for sex, and what does it do with the resulting offspring?
Ballistics has proved a very effective solution. Exploding flowers, fruits,
seeds and spore capsules are scattered far and wide, sometimes onto passing
animals but more often to the wind.

Fungi are the master rocketeers of the vegetable world. Take the mould
Pilobolus, for example. It grows on dung and holds its spore capsules aloft
on tall stalks, aiming them towards the Sun with a light-guided sensor.
As it grows, the capsule fills up with sap until the pressure is so great
that it blasts off its stalk, shooting the spores onto new ground at an
initial speed of about 50 kilometres per hour up to 2 metres away. The spore
capsule is hardly larger than a pinhead, so this athletic feat is equivalent
to a cricketer hitting the ball for six.

BALL GAMES AND POPGUNS

The bird’s nest fungus, Sphaerobolus, is another that likes to play
games. Its spores are in a ball, cradled by a cup. When the cup dries it
suddenly and violently turns inside out, hurling the ball up to 6 centimetres
into the air. A more common mechanism is used by Conidiobolus coronatus,
a parasite of termites and aphids, which fires its spores off using special
swollen cells held in a state of tension. When the tension is released,
the cells catapult their spores into the air.

A whole group of fungi – the ascomycetes, so called because of their
squeezy tubes, the asci – shoot out their spores like miniature popguns.
In Dasyobolus immersus and Podospora fimicola, the ripening ascus becomes
so strained that when its tip bursts, the spores pop out to distances of
up to 40 centi-metres, which is several hundred times the spores’ own size.
In some ascomycetes, so many asci explode at once that the spores are ejected
in puffs of ‘smoke’.

In general, it is obvious how fungal explosive devices work, but there
is one mechanism that puzzled scientists for a long time. The northern leaf
blight, Drechslera turcica, infests maize crops, breaking out on the leaf
surfaces as dark brown lesions from which the spores are launched into the
air. There is no sign of a gun and no tension at work.

The mystery was unravelled by Charles Leach of Oregon State University
in the 1970s. He noticed that the spores always flew off at right angles
to their leaves – unusual behaviour for a fungal gun. It looked so much
like opposite electric charges repelling each other that Leach tried placing
an electrode near the leaf. What he saw was remarkable. The spores flew
to positive electrodes and away from negative ones. Leach also found that
neutralising the leaf with an antistatic gun blocked the launch altogether.
Electricity was clearly involved, but how?

ELECTROSTATIC BALLISTICS

Under normal, fair-weather conditions, vertical voltage gradients of
about 150 to 300 volts per metre commonly occur near the Earth’s surface.
The potential gradient varies during the day and is also influenced by pollution
and the weather – fog, mist, rain, snow and lightning storms all disturb
the atmospheric electricity. Leach discovered an electrical potential of
up to 120 volts between the ground and the surfaces of the maize leaves.
Moreover, the voltage follows a daily cycle, reaching a (positive) peak
in mid-afternoon, when most of the spores are released, and dropping to
negative values at night. Leach proposes a theory of electrostatic ballistics
for these spores. Under the influence of atmospheric conditions, the maize
plants build up electric fields on their leaf surfaces and on any fungi
growing there. The field becomes so intense that eventually it rips the
weakly anchored spores off the fungus and repels them up into the air on
a perpendicular trajectory. The same phenomenon probably explains discharges
of spores from the gills on the underside of mushroom caps.

Some parasitic fungi need to get their spores directly into living animals,
and their modus operandi can be just as devious as that of D. turcica. One
nematode parasite, Haptoglossa mirabilis, shoots a harpoon-like needle into
its prey and then injects its infection spore through a tube. The attack
is so fast that when George Barron of the University of Guelph, Ontario,
discovered it, all he saw at first was a nematode writhing in pain after
a brief encounter with the fungus gun. Meticulous study revealed the harpoon,
which is triggered when the prey touches the gun muzzle, dislodging its
cap. The inverted harpoon is ejected at great speed, like the inside-out
finger of a rubber glove suddenly inflating. Barron is not yet sure how
this ingenious weapon works, but he believes it could be driven by powerful
water pressure like a violent popgun.

Some of the ballistic ingenuity seen in fungi is shared with simple
spore-bearing plants such as ferns, liverworts and mosses. Ferns such as
Dryop-teris keep their spores in capsules on the underside of their fronds.
Each capsule is ringed by a collar of specialised cells which squeeze inwards,
until they erupt violently under pressure, catapulting the spores away.
Liverworts use special four-pronged cells that swell up in humid weather
and, in dry weather, recoil like miniature springs, flicking out the spores.
Mosses use a less violent version of this method, with water-sensitive teeth
that spring back when they dry out.

Seeds are heavier than spores, so dispersal by explosion is less common
in the higher plants. But where it does occur, it can be quite dramatic.
Cyclanthera explodens, touch-me-not and the delightfully named squirting
cucumber, Ecballium elaterium, are all liable to erupt. In the case of the
squirting cucumber, the fruit flies bodily from the plant. It looks like
a hairy gherkin, and as it ripens the fleshy tissue inside becomes engorged
with slimy juice. Eventually the pressure of the juice is so intense that
the fruit bursts off its stalk, and flies through the air, squirting out
seeds and slime through the rupture hole. The record for a squirting cucumber
launch stands at 12.7 metres.

Other fruits use drying tissues to eject their seeds. On a hot sunny
day on heath and moorland, you can hear the snap, crackle and pop of broom
and gorse seed pods splitting under the tensions created by uneven drying.
Noisy as these flora are, they still only manage to fling their seeds a
metre or two. The record launch for this type of explosive drying goes to
a more exotic contender, the tropical tree Bauhinia, which powers its seeds
up to 15 metres.

Flowers sometimes use ballistic contrivances to ensure cross-pollination,
often assisted by insect accomplices. One of the favourite mechanisms is
a spring-loaded stamen (the male sex organ, which carries the pollen). In
flowers such as gorse and broom the stamens are pinned down within keel-shaped
petals. As the flower develops, the petals grow larger and the stamens inside
become stretched until eventually they are primed like an old-fashioned
flintlock gun. When an insect lands on the flower, it dislodges the stamens
from their petal holsters. They spring up and punch their pollen onto the
underside of the insect, where it hitches a lift to the next flower.

FLOWERS THAT PACK A PUNCH

This mechanism for cross-pollination has important economic implications.
It is used by lucerne (otherwise known as alfalfa), one of the world’s most
important sources of fodder and silage. But there is a problem. Honeybees,
which are the farmer’s favourite pollinator, are heavy enough to trigger
the mechanism, but not so heavy that they can ignore the explosive punch
of the stamens. So they learn to cheat the system. Honeybees steal the flower’s
nectar through a natural slit between the petals. They avoid being punched,
but the plant is not properly pollinated. So US farmers now build special
nest sites to encourage larger bees such as the alkali bee Nomia melanderi
and the leafcutter bee Megachile rotundata. These bees are so big that they
seem oblivious to the lucerne’s exploding stamens.

But the punch packed by alfalfa is nothing to that of Catasetum, an
orchid that lives in the tropical forests of Latin America. The violent
behaviour of the male flowers appears to intimidate their bee pollinators
– a ploy that ensures the insect carries only the pollen of the male it
first visits.

Catasetum goes to such extremes to prevent self-pollination and promote
outcrossing that its male and female sex organs are not just on separate
flowers but on separate plants; more often flowers are hermaphrodite. These
flowers were once thought to belong to two species. Both, however, give
off the same telltale perfume to seduce their bee pollinators. When a bee
enters the male flower in search of nectar, it inevitably brushes against
one or both of a pair of long fleshy horns in the centre of the flower.
This somehow triggers the release of two overhead bags of pollen (pollinia),
which are held under tension in a holster. The bags are catapulted out on
a sticky disc, tumble through a partial somersault and hit the bee, sticky
disc first, sometimes with such force that the insect is knocked out of
the flower.

A study in 1986 by Gustavo Romero and Craig Nelson of Indiana University
found that a bee which has experienced this violent explosion is highly
unlikely to visit another male Catasetum. Henceforth the intimidated bee
will visit female flowers only. Here the pollen rubs off, resulting in cross-pollination
and a selective advantage for that male – a clear case of explosive aggression
paying off.

Paul Simons is a television producer and writer. This article is based
on his book The Action Plant, Blackwells, 1992.

For a country that depends on firewood for 60 per cent of all its energy
needs, the deforestation of the country is a crisis far more profound than
the carnage of the civil war. But then none of this should come as a surprise.
The root cause was clear from my bus journey from the frontier to the capital
San Salvador: people are everywhere. Journey times between villages and
between towns are far shorter than is usual for Latin America. The countryside
in between is covered by kilometres of lowland farms bordered by stunning
volcanic cones. It all looks exotic until you realise that the landscape
is almost bare of trees.

In Latin America’s most crowded nation, the ecological equation is painfully
obvious: too many people, too few trees. Not only are the lowlands stripped
of trees; much of the northern mountains have lost their forests and now
their soil. Erosion is affecting more than three quarters of the country.
From the coastal mangrove swamps to the heights of the mountain cloud forests,
virtually every vestige of El Salvador’s original ecology has been destroyed.
Without the protection of forests, rivers are running dry, hillsides are
showing their bedrocks, and to make matters worse the farmlands are some
of the most heavily polluted from pesticides in the whole continent.

El Salvador’s population of just over 5 million is squeezed into a country
the size of Wales. The drive for export foods such as beef has helped to
raze the forests, while the lack of farmland has pushed rural people into
the margins: felling more upland forests or abandoning the countryside altogether
for the sprawling squalor of San Salvador, probably the ugliest capital
in Latin America.

More than half the population is affected by unemployment. Only one
person in ten has clean drinking water, and one child in four is undernourished.
And the population is set to double in just 26 years.

One of the worst ecological nightmares is the Rio Lempa. Its watershed
is shared by Guatemala, Honduras and Salvador, all of them heavily deforested.
The silt from the soil washed down from the bare hillsides is seriously
damaging the three dams on the river. Built to last at least 60 years, they
are now not expected to produce hydroelectricity for more than 25 years
– and so more energy will be needed from firewood.

The 10-year civil war has deepened the ecological crisis even further.
The guerrillas take refuge under forest cover in the northern and eastern
parts of the country, so the military has tried to crush them by burning
the forests down with phosphorus incendiary bombs and napalm. The 5000 hectares
of unique pine forest of Chalatenango and oak forest of Cerro Nejapa are
among many places that have been flattened into wastelands by the military.

Inevitably flora and fauna have suffered. Fourteen species of vertebrates
are known to have been lost, including the tapir, scarlet macaw and ocelot.
El Salvador is the only Central American country without a jaguar. Forty
species of flowering plants have also been recorded lost.

The director of the government’s department of natural resources, Manuel
Benitez, can even predict the ecological crunch point. ‘In 10 years’ time
it will be too late: water supplies will finish, firewood will disappear,
and soil quality will deteriorate further and need more fertilisers.’ That
will trigger problems on a scale unknown even in this wretched part of the
world.

The social and ecological problems of Salvador are so entwined they
can’t be separated. ‘It will lead to worse social problems than the present
war,’ claims Benitez. Yet even though the population is rising by 3-5 per
cent a year, Benitez denies that the ecological problems can be blamed on
the population growth: ‘Before the Spanish occupation there was mass occupation
by Indians, yet Spanish chronicles show that there were many forests when
the conquistadors arrived. It was the Spanish who destroyed the ecology.’

The Spanish conquerors sowed the seeds of the present disaster by growing
crops for export. That tradition was inherited by a few wealthy families
who controlled vast estates, pushing poor farmers off the productive land
and up into the highlands where soils are easily eroded once their forests
are felled. Successive rebellions by the landless poor have all been ruthlessly
crushed by the ruling obligarchy.

Finding solutions to these problems is an environmentalist’s nightmare.
The government is preoccupied with the war, and most of the population is
struggling to make a living. Even if the land were redistributed more fairly,
the campesino peasant farmers do not know how to farm the land sustainably.
Foreign environmental agencies, so strong in other more peaceful parts of
Central America, are not interested.

Yet even though the military conflict grinds on, Benitez is working
to protect what precious little is left of Salvador’s natural heritage.
According to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), 88 of the country’s 682
species of terrestrial vertebrates are either rare or endangered.

At the Laguna Jocotal, the Parks Service operates an innovative wildlife
restoration project. The area is a large wetland, home to 15,000 tree duck.
Local campesinos are organised into cooperatives to protect duck nesting
sites and prevent overfishing. But the wetland is suffering overgrowth of
its aquatic plants from fertilisers washed off surrounding farmlands.

Benitez is currently fighting to protect the border area shared with
Guatemala and Honduras, where the unique ecology in the high mountains includes
endemic birds, such as the rufus robin and a subspecies of the rare quetzal.
In theory it is a joint conservation project between the three countries,
but in practice Guatemala and Honduras have their sights on attracting more
tourists.

Working for a government department, Benitez is at least assured of
funding, albeit very small. Conservationists outside the government struggle
to get any recognition at all. Albert Hellebuck, from the private Salvadorean
conservation society, has been campaigning on TV and in the press for more
recognition of Salvador’s ecological plight. His team is trying to establish
conservation parks just outside San Salvador, and on a mangrove island;
it also advises farmers on how to combat soil erosion. But their efforts
are minuscule compared with the problems faced by the country.

What of the future? The collapse of Salvador’s ecology is inevitable,
and bound to detonate a social crisis that will eclipse the present civil
war. Maybe there will be mass famine, a popular uprising, or some sort of
intervention from outside. There will probably be a mass migration of starving
people into neighbouring Central American countries that might help to precipitate
their own ecological nightmares.

Yet in a sort of perverse way the downfall of this tiny country could
help to save other, much larger parts of Latin America from a similar fate.
The sight of a mass uprising triggered by deforestation could sound the
alarm bells in Amazonia and the other regions that can still be saved. For
the moment, though, El Salvador suffers the dual assault of human carnage
and ecological degradation, and waits for worse to come.

Paul Simons is a writer and broadcaster