In February 2005, I left my home in San Francisco and spun out of the sky onto the notoriously short runway of Toncontín International Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Two weeks prior I had attended my first ETHOS clean-cooking conference in Kirkland, WA, had met Trees, Water & People’s (TWP) founder Stuart Conway for the first time, and entered an obscure line of work that would move me toward my goal of getting paid to travel to Latin America.

This year’s Earth Day had a different shine to it than past years.

While we were shivering at 0℃ here at our annual Fort Collins, CO community celebration, our friends at COEAS in Honduras were in the thick of another heat wave, having put out yet another forest fire in their newly designated National Wildlife Refuge, and inaugurating the new protected area to the public.

There’s a certain magic in serving others… especially when what you’re serving is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream on National Free Cone Day!