From The Daily Beast-For years, Latin Americans were stripping the landscape bare to sell palm leaves to US florists and churches, until an eco-friendly Guatemala program turned things around.
I sat in the passenger seat of Juan Trujillo’s pickup truck, careening through a dense forest in northern Guatemala. The road we were driving on—and I use the word road here with some hesitation—was simply a deeply grooved dirt trail that had been coarsely etched through the jungle so that trucks like this one could travel between the town of Flores, a lovely little place overrun by tourists on an island in the middle of a scenic lake, and the many tiny villages and Mayan ruins that dot the northern jungles. Rains had turned parts of the road into muddy mush, and the trip was about as smooth as the swirling teacup ride at Disneyland. I was being jarred in all directions, my head occasionally thumping up against the roof of the truck, as I tried to do some basic fourth-grade mathematical calculations using the numbers that I had written down in my little notebook at the village we’d just departed.
More here-
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/20/is-palm-sunday-a-rainforest-killer.html
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