Ways of defiance.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editorial

I'm back from vacation: ten days in Costa Rica with my family. I had a terrific time. There's a country that really protects its natural wilderness areas. I saw scarlet-rumped tanagers, three-toed sloths, squirrel monkeys, anteaters, iguanas, and more hummingbirds than I could identify. I read a book just for pleasure on the Spix's Macaw, which is extinct but for a handful in captivity. And I relaxed, which not too many of us in this country get a chance to do these days.

Vacations, for Americans, are becoming rarities. Some of us simply can't afford them. Some of us have bosses who don't allow them. And some of us are so strapped to our desk chairs, our egos chained to our jobs, that we can't get away.

Or if we do, we bring work along with. Books to read, projects to research, papers to write, a laptop at least to check e-mail.

I'm sure you've seen those commercials: the backpacker outside by a beautiful lake, the mountains in the background. He is sitting alone on a rock, but he's not meditating. He's telecommuting!

What fun is that?

The computer has become a treadmill. And we're the hamsters.

Well, this hamster got out for a while. And it felt great!

When I returned, this issue of the magazine was almost done, and when I looked upon it with fresh eyes, I particularly enjoyed the interview with Wangari Maathai, which is our cover.

Managing Editor Amitabh Pal has a knack for interviewing Nobel Peace Prize laureates. He tracked down Mikhail Gorbachev at a bar in Appleton, Wisconsin, for our December 2003 issue. He met up with Shirin Ebadi at Syracuse University for the interview we ran last September. And for this month's issue, he went to New York to meet with Maathai, the inspiring environmentalist from Kenya who makes us widen our definition of peace to encompass ecological sensitivity...