Jeff Greenwald

In fact, Kathmandu’s notorious hashish cafes were outlawed in the early 1970s, when the late King Birendra was crowned. Nepal’s current expatriate scene is huge and vibrant: a close-knit international society of scholars and artists, engineers and expedition leaders. Since 1979, I’ve lived part of nearly every year in Kathmandu. It has been a refuge of relaxed inspiration, a community where, as in Hemingway’s Cuba or Paul Bowles’ Tangier, one can live life on a human scale.

The Kathmandu Valley is such a community for 2.5 million Nepalese as well. Despite its volatile history, which has included corruption and revolution, palace coups and human-rights abuses, Kathmandu is above all sacred ground, a place of ancient and modern pilgrimage. Its citizens are obsessively nationalistic, even if they have been awkward stewards of their magnificent land. They love their country and, in an ambivalent but undeniable way, they loved their king.

Birendra was one of the world’s last absolute rulers. His word, until recently, was law. And though the 1990 revolution made him a constitutional monarch, he was no mere figurehead. He and his family were the keystones of Nepal’s social, political and religious life. A laid-back king who enjoyed a good scotch and cigar more than the elbow grease of governing, Birendra asked the world to view Nepal as a “zone of peace.”

Many Nepalese complained that he confused peace with passivity; but there is no doubt he unified a diverse population under an umbrella of benign tradition. Nearly 100 ethnic groups coexist in Nepal without bloody rivalry. Tibetan refugees fleeing from the Chinese in neighboring Tibet have been welcomed and, despite complaints from China, enjoy religious freedom — including the right to venerate the Dalai Lama.

Birendra was no Nelson Mandela, but he was a source of great stability. He was familiar: Nearly every Nepali, no matter how cynical, saw the king in a fatherly light. And though he was broadly disliked before the 1990 revolution, his ability to change with the times ultimately won him the admiration and respect of his subjects.

This sort of affection is not lavished on the new King Gyanendra, a shrewd and powerful businessman once linked (by a prominent Nepali journalist who was later shot in the head) to drug trafficking. His son, Paras, is bluntly despised and had allegedly engaged in drinking and blowing coke with Dipendra since both were teens. (Back in 1988, a very reliable source informed me that the then 16-year-old crown prince had set his room on fire while freebasing cocaine.)

Another reason to be alarmed at Gyanendra’s rise to power is his realpolitik recognition that China makes a faddish enemy but a profitable friend. For centuries, Nepal’s closest regional tie has been with India, its lumbering democratic neighbor to the south. That relationship has been badly strained for the past 12 years, a tension that culminated in last December’s anti-Indian riots in Kathmandu. Still, India and Nepal remain codependent. Nepal relies on India’s ports and oil, and only the high Himalayas have kept the Chinese from “liberating” the Taj Mahal.

Many Nepalese believe that Gyanendra will cultivate a cozier rapport with China — one that will bring new access roads, industrial incentives, even weapons purchases. Such a move is bound to shorten fingernails in New Delhi. In a worst-case scenario, the tectonic tensions between India and China might come to a head, with Nepal pulverized in the middle. A more likely possibility is that Nepal will bow to pressure from Beijing and begin limiting the freedom of Tibetan refugees — and deporting new arrivals back to China.

But the massacre of Nepal’s royal family is more than a blow to the country’s ethnic stability. It shakes the foundations of every Nepali citizen’s worldview in a way that most Americans, inured to savage and random crimes, can barely comprehend.

Until recently, Nepal proudly identified itself as “the world’s only Hindu kingdom.” Cows wandered the streets freely; the greatest temples in Kathmandu paid homage to the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. A tributary of the holy Ganges River flows through central Kathmandu. The king himself is considered (more metaphorically than actually these days) a manifestation of Vishnu, the great preserver and protector. According to Hindu scripture, Vishnu will appear 10 times to save humanity from destruction. And Gautama Siddhartha — the historical Buddha, also revered as a Hindu god — was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal.

In the Hindu belief system, the family has a central and sacred role. And although the strict code of obedience has relaxed in modern times, the Nepalese remain conscious of karma — the chain of cause and effect that has shaped their past and will determine their future. Reverence for one’s mother and father is fundamental. “Though you might carry her on your back a thousand lifetimes,” one proverb goes, “you can never repay your mother.”

For Prince Dipendra to slaughter his family in cold blood is an act so astonishing, so profoundly taboo in the culture, that the majority of Nepalese simply refuse to accept it — no matter the evidence or the eyewitness accounts. On a personal level, it would be like learning that one’s most revered and respected relative had committed an utterly unspeakable crime. On a national level, it’s as if John-John had shot JFK, Jackie and Caroline before turning the gun on himself, and J. Edgar Hoover had ascended to the presidency.

With its steep, relentless mountains and roaring valleys, Nepal has long been a word-of-mouth society. News traditionally travels from village to village in a continual game of telephone. Though radio and roads have improved the flow of information, gossip and rumor remain valued sources of intelligence.

During the 1990 revolution, a least a dozen rumors circulated through Kathmandu alone: The city’s water supply had been poisoned; Indian troops were massing near Nepal’s southern border; Chinese troops were massing on Nepal’s northern border; the queen had fled to Greenland; the king had placed a direct call to Sylvestor Stallone, begging advice on how to respond to the mass demonstrations.

The aftermath of the June 1 massacre is no different — except that the rumors are perhaps more vicious, and less easy to dismiss. Why were the bodies so quickly cremated, destroying all forensic evidence? Why was Gyanendra the only member of the royal family not present at the family’s dinner? Why was his son Paras left unharmed? Why was the 29-year-old prince, the wealthy and popular heir to the throne, so bent out of shape by a family squabble? Why did Gyanendra insult the nation with an outlandish alibi that a machine gun had “accidentally exploded”? Why did the left-handed prince shoot himself in the right temple?

The truth about June 1 will continue to be argued passionately, with ever-new wrinkles on the mushrooming conspiracy theories. Given the shroud of secrecy over palace affairs, there will never be a fully satisfying outcome. On the one hand, the bulk of evidence points to the most wrenching answer: that Dipendra performed the killings himself. But it seems equally credible that Paras, a notorious drinker already charged with last year’s murder of a popular Nepalese folk singer, may have masterminded the entire scheme.

In a sense, it no longer matters who committed the crime. The fact is that this crisis has shattered the Nepali people. Their simmering distrust of the royal family is now out in the open, much as suspicion of the FBI and the U.S. government surfaced during the JFK investigations. The population has been seeded with anger, and the Nepalese find themselves in a no-win situation. Either the crown prince murdered his family, and a generation of trust and tradition has gone up in smoke, or the whole thing was a conspiracy, in which case the Nepalese are cornered and helpless as the wheels of palace intrigue roll over them.

Given the passionate desire — among expatriates and Nepalese alike — for Dipendra to be absolved, it all adds up to a recipe for conflagration. It’s not unlike the O.J. Simpson case, in that any verdict is sure to ignite shock, public displays of frustration and eternal charges of corruption. Somehow, the investigation committee appointed by the new king — a committee made up of people close to the palace — doesn’t inspire much confidence.

The past 11 years have not been good ones for Nepal. Democratic rule has not flourished, with 10 governments in power since the revolution, each more ineffectual and corrupt than the last. Within this vacuum of leadership, many people longed for the “good old days.” They hoped, not so secretly, that King Birendra would emerge into the limelight, transformed into the wise and powerful king of their dreams. (Last February, a well-known Nepalese artist named Ragini Upadhaya showed her paintings and prints on the theme of corruption; the exhibition was opened, ironically, by the queen.)

But the stuff of dreams has been transformed into a nightmare. What so many Nepalese hoped for — new guidance and control by a beloved king — will have a bitter taste with Gyanendra at the helm. This resentment is the very opening the country’s Maoists have been waiting for — hence the article published last week alleging an Indian/CIA conspiracy and urging the Royal Nepal Army to abandon Gyanendra and unite behind “the people.”

That’s unlikely to happen. True, the five-year-old Moaist insurgency has strong appeal in rural areas; since its inception in 1996, and at a cost of more than 1,600 lives, it has gained a foothold in most of Nepal’s 75 districts. But the Kathmandu Valley is a world apart. Nepal’s middle class has far less to gain from the Maoists than the country’s agrarian majority. Yes, the rank-and-file Nepalese are sick of their greedy and corrupt government, but they desire stability above all else, and the Maoists still represent unpredictability and chaos.

In one respect, however, the inflammatory article in Kantipur was correct. This is an usually opportune moment for the Nepalese, if they so desire, to cast off the yoke of royalty once and for all, as the American colonists did in the 1770s. If they decide to do so, it will not happen peacefully, and it will certainly be frightening. But their choices are limited. The Nepalese can accept the new king, and risk a new era of palace domination (for as the imprisonment of the Kantipur executives shows, the nation’s constitution is still little more than a piece of paper), or they can move to create a true democracy and — temporarily, at least — leave notions of monarchy behind. A compromise may of course be possible, as it was with Birendra. But Gyanendra is not as accommodating as his older brother was.

This week, as the citizens of Kathmandu wait for answers — their nascent freedom of the press already in jeopardy — is the flashpoint. When the investigating committee’s findings are released on Thursday, there may well be violent protests and lives lost.

One thing alone is certain: Nepal’s age of innocence is over. Among locals and expatriates alike, Nepal has always been famous for its sense of spiritual community. For the Nepalese, that community has been shattered — and it is impossible to imagine what might patch it together again.

Last week, a network of eight 3G base stations began operating along the route to Mount Everest, in Sagarmatha National Park. They were installed by Ncell, a Nepali telecom firm. The news didn’t surprise me. But I felt that, irreversibly, another blow had been struck against magic.

Access to the Internet is starting to seem like a human right, so let me offer a disclaimer. There is no rational downside to the arrival of broadband on the flanks of Everest. I’m not a Luddite, and would never suggest that developing nations should be denied, for any reason, the global access that technology can provide. This 3G network will undoubtedly save lives — not only by providing weather information and support to Everest climbers and trekkers, but as an alert system for the nearby villages threatened by flash floods from Glacial Lake Overflow (GLOF), another peril caused by global warming.

It’s a good thing. So why did the news make me feel like Robert Conway in “Lost Horizon,” looking back on a land to which I can never return?

During my earliest visit to Nepal in 1979, phoning home even from Kathmandu was an adventure. I’d bike to the Telecommunications Office at 2 a.m. (mid-afternoon in New York), fill out a form, and wait hours for my trunk call to go through. The costly result was often a busy signal — or a barely audible connection. The most reliable means of communication was “snail mail”: a metaphor that, with three weeks of lag time between a letter and its response, seemed literally true.

Even this much contact was a marvel, compared to the situation in the mountains. When I first trekked the Everest route, in October 1983, it felt as though I’d entered a world completely detached from the familiar. After a harrowing flight to the tiny airstrip at Lukla, the 10-day hike to Base Camp (with an elevation gain of more than 8,000 vertical feet) began. Immersion in the Sherpa Buddhist lifestyle was inescapable, and transformative. Phone calls were impossible. Even writing a postcard was like putting a message in a bottle, and tossing it out to sea.

None of this seemed like an inconvenience. Though there were bouts of homesickness, and the occasional longing for new music and old friends, it was exhilarating to have entered such an isolated realm. This, actually, was the point. Travelers embarked on our journeys to Everest or the Annapurnas aware that it would be a full-body experience — an equation that included our brains.

As a result, trekking in the Himalaya never felt like sightseeing. It was a commitment to the here and now, demanding full-time engagement with both Nepalis and fellow travelers. There were infinite opportunities to forge new friendships, experience Sherpa Buddhist culture, or enjoy exquisite solitude. By day, you could walk alone or with companions; at night, the lodges flickered with candles and butter lamps. Out came the maps, backgammon sets and tattered journals. Tales of avalanches and Yeti sightings were shared, along with cups of the dizzying local rakshi.

During my most recent trek to Everest region in 2008, it was clear that the area was changing. Though the mountains looked the same, they felt less like a world apart. For one thing, it was a lot more crowded; an estimated 15,000 trekkers shared the narrow trails. Cellphones were already in use between the main villages, and the isolating aspects of technology were taking hold. Sherpa guides and sinewy porters marched up the steep mountain grades with telltale white headphone cords snaking beneath their parka collars, lost in the private soundtracks of their MP3 files.

Getting online was a different story. There were only a handful of cybercafes along the trekking route — the highest of which was at Everest Base Camp itself, at 17,500 feet — with Internet access via satellite. Connections were sluggish; it often took Gmail more than five minutes to load. Sitting in a cozy inn, immersed in conversation, was far more seductive than surfing the Web.

The arrival of 3G will change all that — and not just how quickly trekkers can upload their photos to Flickr, keep tabs on their investments, or stream the latest episode of “Mad Men.” Wireless broadband, barely imaginable even 25 years ago, will change the way future travelers and locals interact in the world’s highest mountains.

For the Sherpas of Sagarmatha, of course, it may well seem that one kind of magic has simply been traded for another. Broadband on Everest! What next? If the Yeti buys an iPad, he might even decide to “friend” Bigfoot on Facebook.

For the rest of us, this constant connectedness may have a bittersweet aftertaste. My recent trek into the Himalaya was a reminder of the pleasures of remoteness. It was a joy to escape from the hamster wheel of distractions, and immerse myself in the expanded moment of real time. Because being connected — really connected, with the place you’re in and the people you’re with — requires disconnecting, at least temporarily, from everywhere else.

We are far past the time when we can expect to a find a Shangri-la, anywhere, beyond the reach of the Internet. But as the world races toward connectivity, travelers might stop to consider why we travel in the first place, and which connections we really want to make.

Jeff Greenwald’s new book is “Snake Lake,” a memoir set in Kathmandu during Nepal’s 1990 “People Power” uprising.

On Friday, May 8, the newest offering in the “Star Trek” canon will open in theaters around the world. The film will give us the back story of the original series, and show how its three principals got themselves onto what might be (along with Noah’s Ark and the Titanic) the most famous vehicle in history: the starship Enterprise. Only one of the three main actors of that era will appear in J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek.” It won’t be William Shatner (Kirk), or DeForest Kelley (McCoy), who died in 1999. Though Mr. Spock’s role as a half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet cadet is played by Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy makes a cameo appearance as the future Spock, coming to advise his younger avatar.

Spock has been on many minds lately, and not entirely because of the new film. Big thinkers in both print media and the blogosphere — from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd  to MIT media moguls — have referenced the Enterprise’s science officer in recent months, drawing parallels between the dependably logical half-Vulcan and another mixed-race icon: Barack Obama.

They’re not just talking about the ears. For those of us who watched the show in the 1960s (or during the countless reruns since), Nimoy’s alter ego was the harbinger of a future in which logic would reign over emotion, and rational thought triumph over blind faith. He was a digital being in an analog world; the Pied Piper who led our generation into the Silicon Age.

Anyone who followed the early “Star Trek” with regularity knows how charismatic Spock was. If there were two characters I wanted to be as a young man, they were Spock — and James Bond. Both displayed total self-confidence, and amazing problem-solving skills. Both traveled to exotic destinations, and were irresistible to women. And both shared a quality that my generation lacked completely: composure.

While Bond had his weaknesses (anything in a bikini), Spock was virtually unflappable. The most startling marvels in the cosmos were “fascinating.” Disasters were “unfortunate,” perhaps even “tragic.” The raised eyebrow, the lifted chin, the vaguely sarcastic mien — these were coins of the realm to my pubescent friends. How did we weather the terrors of grade school, and survive the irrational outbursts of parents and teachers? By invoking Spock. Who served as our logical, enlightened counterpoint to the madness of the late 1960s? Who else but Spock?

“I am a first-generation ‘Star Trek’ fan, and I’ve long argued that many of my deepest political convictions emerged from my experience of watching the program as a young man growing up in Atlanta during the civil rights era,” declares Henry Jenkins, co-director of the MIT comparative media studies program and author of “Convergence Culture.” “In many ways, my commitment to social justice was shaped in reality by Martin Luther King and in fantasy by ‘Star Trek.’”

Obama, Jenkins points out, positioned himself in the primaries as a man “at home with both blacks and whites, someone whose mixed racial background has forced him to become a cultural translator.” In this sense Obama even surpasses Spock, whose struggle to reconcile his half-human, half-Vulcan genes is a continual source of inner conflict. In one episode, the entire Enterprise crew (except for Kirk) is infected by alien spores that turn them into doe-eyed flower children. The “cure” is anger — thus Kirk is forced to provoke his first officer to rage. He succeeds, spectacularly, by insulting Spock’s racial pedigree: “All right, you mutinous half-breed! You’re an overgrown jackrabbit! An elf, with a hyperactive thyroid! A simpering, devil-eared freak whose father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia!”

Confronted with a similar insult, Barack Obama would probably just laugh. “The Vulcan side of Obama, the core of his character, hasn’t changed [since the election],” Jenkins believes. “He’s tough, he’s cool and he’s rational.” His appeal stems from the self-aware integration of all aspects of his personality: black and white, wonk and poet, athlete and aesthete.

Like Spock, part of what makes Obama so appealing is the fact that although he’s an outsider — “proudly alien,” as Leonard Nimoy once put it — he uses that distance to cultivate a sense of perspective. And while we’re drawn to Spock’s exotic traits — the pointy ears, green blood and weird mating rituals — we take comfort in his soothing baritone, prominent nose and ordinary teeth.

Spock’s appeal, according to the actor who portrayed him, came from cultivating this dichotomy. In 1997, I interviewed Nimoy for my book “Future Perfect: How ‘Star Trek’ Conquered Planet Earth.” “There is a sensitive side to Spock,” Nimoy said, “to which a lot of people, male and female, responded. Also very important — at least I thought it was, because it was what I was constantly playing — is the yin/yang balance between our right and left brains. How do you get through life as a feeling person, without letting emotions rule you? How do you balance the intellectual and emotional sides of your being?”

The early Spock’s only real vice was sardonic ire (often directed at McCoy). But this was also one of his most appealing qualities — because Spock, as Jenkins gleefully asserts, is “someone who can bitch slap you with his brain.” It’s an ability shared by Obama — who, unlike Spock, doesn’t employ that superpower recreationally. His brilliance isn’t a defense (or defended by sarcasm). While Obama embodies Spock’s passion for reason, he adds the element of warmth.

“Star Trek” fans who bonded with Spock already understood what those of us who followed Obama learned early on: that witnessing a powerful intellect can be deeply satisfying on an emotional level. We got a similar hit from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys, of course, and from Bill Clinton. But while Clinton’s administration was smart, Obama’s seems futuristic.

“Bill Clinton promised a Cabinet that looked like America,” Henry Jenkins said in a recent conversation. “Obama gave us one that looks like the Enterprise crew. In a matter-of-fact way, he’s embraced diversity at every level. No Klingons yet — but the administration is new.”

During the months that I researched “Future Perfect,” people all over the world admitted a longing for the zeitgeist of “Star Trek.” “The Enterprise crew was a professional team of people solving problems together,” agreed Nimoy. “It was always a very humanistic show, one that celebrated the potential strengths of mankind, of our civilization, with great respect for all kinds of life, and a great hope that there be communication between civilizations and cultures.”

Which is another reason why the sometimes audacious diplomacy of the Obama administration is innately appealing to those of us weaned on the credo of “exploring strange new worlds” and “seeking out new life and new civilizations.” And what if the Earth itself was visited by aliens? If benevolent ETs were to land on the Mall tomorrow, most of humanity would be proud to have Barack Obama speak for us. If Bush were still president, we’d be looking at “Mars Attacks.”

The problem with smart, thoughtful people is that you have to pay attention. Even with “Star Trek,” some viewers complained that the stories were too complicated, requiring too much focus for the average TV viewer. Nimoy sympathized. “‘Star Trek,’” he reflected, “was a language show. A lot of the ideas were expressed verbally. It has been said — and I think it’s true — that if you didn’t listen to ‘Star Trek,’ you couldn’t follow the stories.”

The same could be said of today’s White House: It’s a language show. “Issues are never simple,” Obama has said. “Very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.” The stakes are high, the narrative is complex, and no one’s talking down to us.

Obama, like Spock, rewards close listening. His cool logic is a real departure from what we’ve grown used to. Often presidential speechmaking is an emotive art, where oratory trumps reason. What was being said was often confused with how it was being said. We could watch Ronald Reagan with the sound off, and get a pretty good sense of how we were supposed to feel. Bill Clinton’s richly accented arias lulled us, while reactions to the appearances of George W. Bush — pro or con — were driven less by analysis than by a limbic, visceral response.

Not that we don’t have a visceral response to Obama. But it’s a very different feeling, a pride of possession familiar to old-school “Trek” fans, whose millions of letters kept NBC from canceling the show in 1967. That victory — one of the first cases of the mass media being influenced by overwhelming grass-roots support — gave Trekkers the indelible sense that “Star Trek” was theirs. And while none of Obama’s individual supporters can claim ownership of his presidency (any more than “Star Trek’s” fans write the movies), they’re well aware that it was  similar grass-roots movements — on the Internet, at thousands of small-scale fundraisers and on the streets of contested states like Ohio and Florida — that sustained his phenomenon.

So we come, unavoidably, to the Big Question: What would Barack Obama himself say to this comparison? How might our president respond to the cartoons circulating on the Internet, showing him sporting Vulcan ears and a Starfleet tunic? In a September 2008 broadcast of the popular NPR show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” guest Leonard Nimoy recalled a recent encounter with a fan.

“About a year and a half ago, I was at a political event. One of our current campaigners for the office of president of the United States saw me — and as he approached, he gave me the Vulcan hand signal.” You can practically hear Nimoy’s eyebrow raise. “It was not John McCain.”

Bunaken lies off the north shore of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The small island is one of the gems in Bunaken National Marine Park, created in 1991, one of Indonesia’s first marine parks. I am here with Seacology, a nonprofit group based in Berkeley, Calif., that works with islanders around the world to help preserve indigenous communities and ecosystems. In Bunaken and neighboring Manado Tua, a perfectly round island dominated by the towering cone of a dormant volcano, Seacology is funding a revolutionary practice of reviving coral reefs.

Often called the “rain forests of the sea,” coral reefs are among the world’s most endangered ecosystems. Currently, all of the world’s reefs would cover an area only half the size of France. Once damaged, reefs demand well over a century to regrow; in many areas, they may not grow back at all. With the reefs gone, fish disappear, and the islands themselves become vulnerable to destructive waves and erosion.

The years prior to 1991 saw a lot of bad mojo at work around Bunaken and Manado Tua. For decades, fishermen bombed the reefs with dynamite, or squirted them with sodium cyanide, to net large harvests of fish that surfaced. Low tides forced local boats to anchor amid the fragile corals, and dive boats (not to mention clumsy divers) wrought havoc as well. Storms reduced already weakened corals to rubble. By the time the national park was created, big sections of the reef were already in dire shape.

In 1998, marine biologist Mark Erdmann, a senior advisor to Conservation International, along with Indonesian activist Meity Mongdong and dive master Christiane Muller, helped create a management board for the Bunaken National Park. They managed to shift control of the park away from the central government in Jakarta and put it in the hands of local villagers, fishermen and dive operators — people with a vested interest in preserving the area’s ecology.

Environmentalists have employed various strategies over the years to revive crippled reefs, from sinking old railroad cars to dropping huge cement balls into the rubble; anything to give new corals a handhold. But the most elegant fix, the one funded by Seacology, may be EcoReefs: white ceramic modules, the size of squat, round coffee tables, that look like 3-D snowflakes (they’re inspired by the shape of staghorn coral). Anchor enough of them in the rubble, the theory goes, and tiny polyps — the animals that create coral reefs — will take root on the modules’ arms and fish will return in huge schools.

EcoReefs are the brainchild of Michael Moore, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moore looks like a young Ed Harris and holds a Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley. “One of my favorite things about EcoReefs,” he says, “is that unlike old tires or railroad cars, they’re not marine pollution. They are made of harmless materials that will ultimately be broken down by wave energy — leaving only the new reef growth in place.”

In 2003, hundreds of modules were brought to the northern Sulawesi islands. Local dive operators and villagers worked together to assemble them. “It was fantastic,” Erdmann says. “Everyone from little kids to grandparents helped out. Then the dive operators came to do the underwater installation.”

The largest installation is off the coast of Manado Tua, where blasted reefs are shored up with 620 modules. Seacology donated the EcoReefs to the island’s villagers in exchange for an agreement to leave the area alone: No Fishin’. There’s no diving, either, but exceptions are made for biologists and, fortunately, journalists.

Froggies Divers sits on the curving southern shore of Bunaken’s hourglass-shaped coastline, a funky resort of clapboard bungalows with thatched roofs, a sand-floored dining area and a lively, expressive population of geckos. The owner and proprietor is Christiane Muller, 67. She’s as unusual a creature as you’re likely to find on Sulawesi’s reefs. Christiane had numerous previous lives before Froggies, working as a DNA researcher, a simultaneous translator (she speaks six languages), and as a field recorder of Southeast Asian music.

“I’d never had any interest to dive,” she says, as she lights another in an endless series of clove cigarettes. “But in 1988, I was on vacation with my son, Martin, in the Carribbean. He was going scuba diving and asked me to join him. I said no, and he said, I dare you. That was all it took.”

This area of northern Indonesia, where Alfred Russel Wallace got the jump on Darwin in 1859, is considered one of the most spectacular dive sites in the world. The islands are surrounded by a huge submarine trench, nearly 3 miles deep at places. Diving along the wall is dizzying; it’s like hovering in space, just over the edge of the Grand Canyon. The trench is a blessing. Cool water welling up from the depths helps protect the reef against global warming and makes the area a perfect environment for everything from featherworms to spinner dolphins.

Christiane and I anchor to a mooring in sight of the village of Nigiri, where the red spires of Manado Tua’s white church rise into the shimmering sky. We strap on air tanks, roll backward into the water, and begin our descent.

The EcoReefs cover several thousand square feet of sea floor. On land, they look attractive but artificial, like contemporary sculpture. Underwater, they’re something else entirely: a hybrid of technology and organic life. Moore has a lot of faith in his reefs — “If we build them, they will come,” he has said — but their growth would probably exceed his wildest dreams.

Nearly two years after the EcoReefs were submerged, their antler-shaped arms are covered with baby corals and sponges, more varieties than I can count. Parrotfish, Moorish idols and clownfish have set up shop beneath their limbs; two tiger cowries nestle near one’s center.

One of the techniques used to jump-start growth on the EcoReefs is “coral transplants.” Chunks of loose coral are physically attached to the EcoReefs with little plastic ties. Oddly, the modules with the transplants have done no better than the ones left to their own devices. No one knows why; perhaps corals, like delicate houseplants, favor a specific angle to the sun.

Christiane busies herself with maintenance, using a dive knife to scrape a cauliflower-like soft coral that, unchecked, will cover the modules like an invasive weed. As she works, a handsome eagle ray, about 6 feet across, hovers nearby, watching with undisguised curiosity.

An hour later, back on the boat, Christiane shakes her head. “It’s incredible,” she says. “There are all kinds of fish; much more diversity than when I visited last. And at least two kinds of corals: acrophora, and millephora. Millephora, fire coral, is an especially good sign, because it means big boulders — coral heads — will grow. The whole area will become the foundation for a new reef. This is exactly what everybody was wishing for.”

We strip off our wet suits, leave the boat, and wade in toward Nigiri. Pa (“Sir”) Ganche is the village chief, a big man with a broad face and fin-shaped feet. He meets us by his house, right next to the church.

“The population of Nigiri is 1,139,” he says. “The EcoReefs belong to everyone and we all take care to see that no one is fishing in the no-take zone.” Ganche, free-diving, checks the modules at least twice a week. “The coral grows back much faster there than anywhere else; we didn’t expect it to be so quick!”

The terms of the Seacology agreement require them to wait five years before fishing here again but Ganche and the villagers are unlikely to start so soon. “For the time being,” he says, “we don’t plan to fish there again at all.”

The next morning I meet with Pa Yunus, the local coordinator of Bunaken National Park, in Froggies’ open-air dining room. With his coiffed black hair and world-weary grin, Yunus looks like an Indonesian Clark Gable, around the time of “The Misfits.”

Yunus reviews the park’s figures with me. About 40,000 guests visited Bunaken in 2003, each paying a modest entrance fee (for me, about $18). This generated more than a billion rupiah — over $100,000 — in revenue. Eighty percent of this goes to park management, which includes boat patrols of protected areas, moorings, salaries and a fund shared by the 31 villages within the park. The rest goes to Jakarta.

Yunus is mainly involved with the security patrols, which are still needed. In August, a boatload of men were caught fishing illegally in the waters off Manado Tua. “They threatened us with their spear gun,” says Yunus, “but stood down when the park rangers showed their pistols.”

On the Bunaken reefs, there’s a species of big-lipped wrasse so colorful that one might mistake it for a parrotfish. During my final dive, I see one following me; it stays by my side nearly 20 minutes, occasionally darting off to gnaw at the corals.

When I return to Froggies and tell Christiane, she laughs with delight. “Nine or 10 years ago,” she says, “there was one wrasse — just one — who would follow people that way. The fish had figured out that by doing so it could leave its territory without being chased by other fish. Now, all the big-lipped wrasse are doing it. How they learned this from each other, no one knows.”

The encounter seems like a wonderful metaphor. Maybe all the animals in Bunaken National Marine Park will one day come to see humans as their allies.

But if one were to speed up the clock, the crisis threatening the region would become obvious. The mangrove swamps would recede, making way for new resorts; the reefs would burst and dissolve, destroyed by dynamite fishing, coral harvesting and pollution. Swaths of tropical rain forest would vanish, giving way to erosion. Mudslides would pour though villages. Worst of all — and invisible even in time-lapse photography — one species after another would blink out of existence, its last member obliterated with no more concern than the accidental crushing of an ant.

It’s happening everywhere, of course, but on islands the rate of species extinction is snowballing at a stunning rate. Globally, 75 percent of all recent animal extinctions have happened on islands; nearly three-quarters of all the plant and animal extinctions recorded in U.S. history have occurred in Hawaii alone. Today, Indonesia’s 10,000-plus islands have more species threatened with extinction than any other nation on the planet.

Sometimes environmental pressures come from outside developers; sometimes they come from traditional practices like hunting, fishing or tree-cutting. It’s hard to break such habits or show why resisting development is a good idea in the long run. That’s where Seacology comes in. The nonprofit group, based in Berkeley, Calif., represents a new league of environmental groups that work directly with indigenous people to help them preserve their communities. Seacology, which focuses on islands, offers local people tangible benefits such as a new school for protecting the biodiversity of their lands. It also empowers village councils to monitor and enforce the protected areas.

On a recent morning, furious wind and intense rain hammer Manado, located in northern Sulawesi, scattering the tinny call of a mosque in all directions. I’m driving south to the village of Kawangkoan, where Seacology is renovating a primary school in exchange for 140 hectares (roughly 350 acres) of “no-take” tropical forest: a zone that will be left in pristine condition, protected from logging or hunting by villagers or the government. My guide and companion is Meity Mongdong, a short, sparky woman with features that one might mistake for Mayan. Mongdong is in her early 30s and a native of northern Sulawesi. Her father is a teacher from Minahasa and her mother a nurse from Manado Tua, a cloud-wreathed, Bali Hai-ish island to the north. In 2002, Seacology awarded Mongdong its annual environmental prize for her work in the marine sanctuary of Bunaken, where she galvanized the local community and put what had been bumbling, top-down management of the national park into the hands of local villagers, fishermen and dive operators.

We stop at a small church to pick up Janny Rotinsulu, a graphic designer and community leader who was instrumental in getting the Kawangkoan project off the ground. Rotinsulu is a young, immediately likable man with a round, clear face and an astonishing smile; he made a bundle living in Jakarta, designing ads for BMW, before moving back to his home village.

Kawangkoan, Rotinsulu explains, means “Big Land,” the name given by the original inhabitants. The parcel of rain forest being protected with Seacology’s support, he explains, is a beautiful tract of land with two waterfalls, giant hornbills and numerous rare mammals, including tarsiers (the world’s smallest primate, a tiny monkey with Bill Keane eyes) and wild cows. I didn’t even know wild cows existed. Rotinsulu nods grimly. “They can be very aggressive,” he says.

The moment we leave the outskirts of Manado, the rain forest becomes thick and heavy. As we enter Kawangkoan, signs of earlier inhabitants appear in the form of warunga: mysterious stone tombs that litter the landscape by the thousands. Little is known about them; they might be anywhere from 300 to 700 years old, and are decorated with odd, sometimes macabre, carvings. They remind me of the ghostly tombstones found in old Dutch cemeteries around Tarrytown and Hastings. This is probably not a coincidence; the Dutch controlled Indonesia for centuries, even though these northwestern reaches were also on Portuguese routes.

The forest itself is a tract owned by Kawangkoan, and the decision to create and enforce a no-take zone requires only village approval. Indonesia already has strict laws against cutting the forests, and I wonder how this newly protected area will affect people hoping to build new houses. But Mongdong and Rotinsulu agree that the lack of lumber isn’t an issue; when wood is cut down, it’s usually shipped off to Jakarta for wealthy people wanting to build Minahasa-style homes. The real ecological problems here are game poaching and people clearing land for farming.

We drive our Daihatsu van down a dirt road and arrive at the existing elementary school, built in 1975. “The building is awful,” says headmaster Christian Wenas. “It is falling apart. Huge chunks are missing from the roof; during the rainy season, water pours in.”

We stand outside one of the large classrooms beneath a plumeria tree. A cow wanders by; I eye it with some apprehension. Wenas, who has been in the local education business for 37 years, shows me the holes in the roof, the broken benches and inadequate desks. The school serves 183 students, ages 5-12, from four villages. The terms of a financial agreement with Seacology are fairly simple: Seacology will provide around $12,000 for the project, money the foundation raised from private donors. In return, the village council will sign on the dotted line, promising to leave the agreed area of the rain forest intact. Rehabilitation of the school will begin as soon as the village leaders sign the agreement. When it’s all settled, Kawangkoan gets a new school, as well as a protected rain forest — not exactly a hard bargain.

By the time we return to Manado, the island is obscured by massive gray clouds. The wind rises, and within minutes the sky opens, pelting the tin roof of Mongdong’s office, peppering the sea and cleaning the dust off our van. We drive the narrow lanes slowly, passing two little girls gleefully shampooing their hair in the rain.

The following morning we drive west to several more villages in Minahasa district, where Seacology projects are well underway or complete. “I grew up here, in these coastal areas,” says Mongdong, “and I loved the beaches and the reef fish. Even as a child, I could see that the coastal communities were poorer than the upland people; we depended on the marine environment, and the quality of those resources were going down. The distances fishermen had to travel for a catch were getting greater. That’s why I felt that I needed to do something.”

The road is as smooth and black as a graphite line drawn through the jungle. “When I was a girl,” Mongdong recalls, “transportation to Kumu was by boat.”

We pass the Telekom booths, traditional markets and horse-drawn carriages of Tanawangko, and drive through a town called Poopoh. “It means ‘coconut,’” explains Mongdong.

Mongdong’s hometown, Kumu, is a tidy village ending at the sea. There isn’t a trace of litter on the streets. Motorbikes buzz up the road, driven by 12-year-old girls and fishermen with skin like fish jerky. There are churches everywhere, and the new school we’ve come to see — built with Seacology’s help — is behind one of them. It’s a single-level, L-shaped building with blindingly white walls and slatted wooden windows that channel the breeze into the large classrooms.

“My parents are both very socially minded,” Mongdong says as we approach the school. “My mother works as a nurse for low-income families; I’ve seen her treat people in exchange for bananas. My father worked as a teacher. He has a strong personality, and can be difficult to get along with; he’s hard-nosed, but also very honest. He helped the people in Kumu understand the impact of logging the forest and the problems it was causing; and he also helped see that every rupiah went to the project, and not into someone’s pocket.”

The school opened in August but already feels lived in. Classes are in session when we arrive, and I’ve never seen a more expressive bunch of kids. They shriek with glee as the teacher introduces us, then leap to their feet to sing an Indonesian version of “Frère Jacques” at earsplitting volume.

The teacher, a beautiful woman named Sartji Manangkoda, is seven months pregnant, and her desk is littered with flower parts: a big pink bud, broad leaves, long stems. “This is a science class,” she explains. The children sit in neat rows behind shared wooden desks, dressed in white uniforms and waving their arms frantically after every one of the teacher’s questions.

Two hundred fifteen families from four villages send 102 students, ages 6 to 13, to the school. During a break, all eight teachers — four volunteers and four employees, who each earn between $100 and $150 a month — meet me in the courtyard. They express unanimous delight with the building.

“The old school was very hot,” one of them recalls. “There was no air circulation at all. During the rainy season, we had to tell the students to go home; water flooded the classrooms.”

Still, the effort to build the school in exchange for protecting Manenembo-nembo — the local stand of tropical rain forest, which borders all four villages — met with opposition at the start, mainly from villagers who felt threatened by the idea of a no-take zone in the forest. The complaints stopped when people saw the new school, and realized that it hadn’t been an empty promise.

A few hundred yards away, we meet the men charged with the conservation plan’s development and enforcement. District supervisor Harry Runtualian, a rough-looking character wearing a black T-shirt, sums up the reasons the program has succeeded.

“Only about 5 percent of the villagers cut trees from the forest, but it had a big impact,” he says. The river dried up because the trees were no longer holding water; a landslide covered the road; sediments washed into the sea and covered the coral reef, killing off the fish. Awareness of these problems came from the Sulawesi people, he says, not from an outside agency telling them what their problems were.

It wasn’t just a matter of harvesting trees. Wild pigs and bats were being killed, and the endemic crested black macaque was hunted for food. The hunters were among the most vocal critics of the proposal. But they’re not complaining anymore. When I ask why, Runtualian’s answer seems both reasonable and ominous: “Face-to-face discussions.”

Part of the deal included money for several thousand nantu saplings, which Runtualian and his two colleagues have been carrying, nearly two miles up into the open forest, for planting. It will take the hardwoods from five to 10 years to grow. When I ask who is charged with enforcing the no-take rule, Runtualian points to a tall man wearing a green Lacoste knockoff and a ten-gallon hat: “The Cowboy.” Despite his Gary Cooper poise, Wely — the man’s real name — doesn’t look like much of a match for poachers armed with rifles or machetes. But all he has to do, I learn, is warn the culprits and report them to the local council. On a second infraction, the police and forestry rangers take over.

Impressively, conservation has quickly become a part of the local mindset. Erni Sumatow, a woman from the nearby village of Pinasungkulan, recently pushed through a Seacology project protecting the local reef, mangrove swamp and rain forest, all in exchange for a new drinking water distribution system. “People truly believed that it was their right to take everything they needed from the beach and forest, even using bombs to fish the reef,” she says. “Building awareness wasn’t easy; we informed people of the issues at every opportunity: at meetings, weddings, funerals, any time the villagers were together. Eventually, it worked. It was hard at the beginning — but now people think it’s a very good thing.”

For all their apparent success, Seacology’s projects prompt another question: If communities are being asked to protect their forests forever, what happens when the school, or water system, eventually falls apart? What’s the incentive to keep Kumu or Kawangkoan from cutting down trees after 20 or 50 years?

In Manado, Meity Mongdong and I pick up a marine biologist and conservation specialist named Mark Erdmann, who has lived in the area for more than 10 years. We drive together to a rustic cafe, high in the hills overlooking the city. Mark and Meity order avocado smoothies; I wait and see if they look better than they sound.

Erdmann explains that conservation in Indonesia had typically operated in a top-down fashion. People were told that if they cut down trees or poached animals they would face stiff penalties. But the punitive approach wasn’t successful. Seacology’s approach to offer something in return, he says, “really grabs the interest of villagers.”

Still, Erdmann says, Seacology knows it can’t ask for anything in perpetuity. In general, it enacts commitments with villages that last 20 to 30 years. “But after that the school or dock will have fallen apart,” Erdmann says. “At that point, we hope that the concept of conservation has sunk in enough so that people continue to respect it, and that things have progressed to a point where the villagers are not so dependent on natural resources.

“And if not, what’s the worst that could happen? What if, in three years, Kumu turns around and cuts down its forest? At the very least, they got a school. It was a low-cost investment and it made a big difference in some people’s lives. Compare that with what happens when huge conservations groups come in. They might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants and posters, and at the end of the day, when that project folds, the community is left with nothing.”

“There’s no place else to put them,” he shrugs. The deactivated mines, he says, pose no hazard, unless the temperature in the barracks rises above 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit).

No one knows exactly how many mines were scattered through Kuchchaveli by the tsunami; the records from the nearby Sri Lanka Navy base, where the devices originated, were lost in the flood. Vavuniyu’s best guess is that some 850 Pakistan- and Chinese-made mines were washed inland out of minefields and storehouses. Some ended up in the local schoolyard. Others were found lodged in trees, hidden between boulders, or buried under the sandy soil. Ramesh Kumar, a field officer mapping out the danger areas, says he’s found mines floating in wells.

Mines, as well as UXO (unexploded ordnance, which includes live bullets, rockets, mortars, artillery and fuses) have long been flies in the ointment of this island paradise. The danger zone is the northeastern coast, where the simmering conflict between the government and Tamil Tigers (the LTTE) has cost 60,000 lives — twice the toll of the tsunami. The government has admitted that it planted about a million mines to combat operations by the separatist rebels. There are no figures from the Tigers themselves, but the United Nations estimates that the LTTE has buried another half million mines. As for the UXO count, that’s anybody’s guess.

During the 20 years for which there are records — from 1985 through 2004 — 1,063 Sri Lankan civilians have been maimed and 194 killed by the explosives.

“It’s a very serious problem,” says Judy Grayson, of UNDP Mine Action. “It’s not on a par with a place like Afghanistan, where there are many more mines. But it’s a huge problem for people whose houses are endangered, or for kids who can’t go to school because of the mines and UXO that have washed up into the schoolyards.”

Ironically, there was a rash of civilian casualties (15-20 per month) right after the 2002 cease-fire. That’s because previously restricted areas, like highway A-9, which connects the northern city of Jaffna with the rest of the island, was reopened after 20 years and people started moving through heavily mined areas.

Beneath their flak jackets and helmets, DDG members wear color-coded shirts: yellow for the team leader, orange for section leader, green for medic. Deminers wear red, and drivers blue. The rainbow of colors seems deceptively cheerful as Vavuniyu and his co-workers use primitive tools to unearth the weapons. Working with hand rakes and probes beneath the sweltering sun, they will examine every centimeter of Kuchchaveli’s 2 square kilometers.

Paul Boncz, a former Swedish army lieutenant who, until 2000, was teaching soldiers how to lay mines, is the technical advisor for the multiethnic team of 400 Sri Lankans, some of who are working in the country’s eight other hot spots. An unlikely figure in his jeans and worn-out T-shirt, the lanky Boncz looks more like a beachcomber than an unexploded-ordnance expert.

Each of the P-4s, he says, holds 32 grams (just over an ounce) of plastic explosive.

“When one of the mines ignites,” he explains, “it sends shrapnel flying upwards at a speed of 6,000 to 7,000 meters per second, at a temperature of up to 4,000 degrees Celsius. It sounds lethal but it’s usually not. That’s because the idea of these mines is not to kill but to maim; that’s because six to eight people are needed to deal with a single wounded. So the idea, really, is to decimate the troops. Mines blow up feet, legs and hands, while the aftershock blasts sand and dirt into the wounds and genital area, destroying muscle tissue.”

Every step taken in Kuchchaveli is taken with care. Even the cleared areas are approached with caution; what if a mine slipped through the dragnet? Treading lightly, I make my way to the local school, where mines were recovered from the playground. Outside are a series of cartoon posters in Sinhalese and Tamil, showing a pigtailed girl pointing in alarm to stray mines, mortars and rockets. Behind her stand a parent, a cleric and a teacher.

“If you see something suspicious,” the caption reads, “report it to your elders!”

In the empty classroom, the scene is equally grim. Instead of wildlife posters or world maps, the walls are plastered with mine identification charts. A poster showing six mines invites kids to match each one with its name and country of origin.

The beach, 100 yards away, is bisected by a fence, emblazoned at regular intervals with skull-and-crossbones warning signs. A short distance away, cement is being poured for permanent signposts and fences, marking the areas where the Sri Lankan navy will keep their existing mines in situ. (The army and navy deal with mine clearing on their own bases.)

Near the remains of a Hindu temple, I meet a team leader who asks to be called Peter. He’s a black-haired, fierce-eyed team leader from Jaffna, the heart of the country’s ethnic strife. Peter joined the DDG in July 2004, well before the tsunami. He’s exasperated by what he’s seen.

“Some records say there are more than 1 million mines in the north and east,” he affirms. “So If we clear 100 mines in this place, it’s solving .01 percent of the problem.

“Look around this village,” Peter says, gesturing at the dirt streets, shambled homes and thin cattle. “This is one of the effects of this war. People in these areas are not well educated. The one thing they do get is mine education.

“We want to do something for the motherland,” he asserts. “But we’re frustrated. What’s the use of our effort, unless the government and rebels agree not to lay more mines? All this money, all this labor, all this time. It’s pointless. If there would be a peace agreement between the government and the LTTE, we could make real progress.” This government, he pronounces bitterly, “is bullshit.”

Although the DDG will soon wrap up its operations in Kuchchaveli, they’ll continue their work in 27 other areas. There may come a point when a mine ban in Sri Lanka is realized and the monsters beneath Naba Vavuniyu’s bed vanish. Meanwhile, several major nightmares persist.

“First,” Grayson says, “there’s no actual peace agreement between the country’s warring factions, just a cease-fire.” Also, during the two years since the cease-fire, the government has been juggling an awful lot of issues, and that was before the tsunami. They’ve stopped planting mines, and for now, that’s good enough for them. The ban just isn’t a priority.

The process gets even more complicated when it comes to the “dangerous areas” still under LTTE control. There, an independent demining group run by the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization pokes and prods the soil. It’s a tangled web, woven through decades of suspicion and resentment.

Nimbly, the UNDP supports demining efforts on both sides. “But it’s difficult,” Grayson allows with an audible sigh. “They’re living in a very complicated place.”