Is Palm Sunday a Rainforest Killer?

I sat in the passenger seat of Juan Trujilloâ??s pickup truck, careening through a dense forest in northern Guatemala. The road we were driving onâ??and I use the word road here with some hesitationâ??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 weâ??d just departed.