Whenever she sees smoke curling over the horizon, Paula Tepano instinctively grabs her two-way radio. If she’s lucky—if the battery is still charged after a long day in the field, if the base operator hears her, if a truck is available—she might help avert a destructive blaze. As precious minutes tick by, she says, some of her park ranger colleagues sometimes try to stamp out grass fires themselves. “But that’s risky,” says Tepano, one of the rangers at Easter Island’s Rapa Nui National Park. The deliberate burning of pastures has become one of the chief environmental threats on this remote spot of Chilean territory 2,300 miles (3,700 kms) off the South American mainland. Carried out by residents who believe periodic fires improve... [Log in to read more]