Cholera is working its way through Haiti. It is killing people and terrifying everyone. Medical help and money has been pouring in -- not enough money, the United Nations says, but a lot of money, a lot more money than has been flowing for a much worse health problem.

In...

The little girl in the faded blue dress stood on a bare hillside in one of the most desperate slums in Africa, the mud-walled houses behind her packed so close together that their rusty tin roofs overlapped. She looked out across a steep ravine in Kibera, Kenya....

PAHOKEE, Fla. -- Glenn Gannon stood in dusty, steel-toed boots and white hard hat on the grassy dike at Lake Okeechobee, one of the biggest lakes in America and one of the most worrisome. A blazing sun glistened on the dark blue waters and a tiny breeze rippled the saw...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Around the clock, from a control room on the edge of the Everglades, technicians track water levels in the canals, lakes and marshes across the southern part of Florida. On their computer screens, they can see changes hundreds of miles away and with a few...

KISUMU, Kenya--The rainy season in East Africa is also the malaria season.

Rain water collects in puddles and old tires and gutters. It...

FORT LAUDERDALE -- Summer time. Hurricanes. This year, with a very busy hurricane season coming up -- according to government and university experts -- the National Weather Service wants to set a few things straight.

For nearly 40 years, government forecasters have been describing hurricanes in...

DUNGA, Kenya--It was shortly after daybreak and a long, wooden fishing skiff crunched up on the stony beach here along Lake Victoria. Women who sell fish in the market in nearby Kisumu swarmed the boat. They grabbed slippery Nile perch and tilapia and tossed...

KIBERA , Kenya -- The government clinic gets a shipment of water purification tablets every three or four months. In a week or two the tablets are gone. And then the people here in this rambling slum on the edge of Nairobi are on their own.

So how...

MIAMI--As a boy in Haiti, Jean Wiener liked to poke around the coral reefs just offshore. The coral was thick and wild and splashed with bursts of orange and purple. Swarms of Yellow Tail Snappers and Nassau Groupers cruised past...

LUANDA KOTIENO, Kenya--The gray donkey stood passively, shifting a little now and then as a man in a deeply faded shirt strapped yellow plastic barrels of water on its back.

The man was a water merchant. He was working a few miles from this little ramshackle town in...

MIAMI -- The news came from South Africa. It was about an expensive new soccer stadium that had been built in a city where the drinking water is often dirty and many people have neither electric lights nor toilets.

Flying into Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, you see a wide, milky border stretching out to sea from the beaches. It is Haiti dying a little more, bleeding off more of its topsoil and turning the coastal waters into a disaster zone.

The mud...

MIAMI -- Steven Solomon was just starting the research on a huge book on the global water problem when his wife Claudine got the idea - independently - to take some of her middle school students to Africa to work on a water project.

In three...

MIAMI -- A journalist friend in New York with good ideas and a big heart had been reading reports about Haiti and its worn, unproductive and often dangerous landscape.

Most of the country's trees had long since been chopped down for firewood. Much of the topsoil...

The Everglades - The sawgrass and cattails, green with brown accents, bent in the late afternoon wind. Sunlight glinted off the tight ripples scudding across the ponds and little bays. A turkey buzzard shot sideways on an easterly gust.

From my spot on a narrow dirt dike, marshy fields stretched...

MIAMI -- Throughout the history of foreign assistance, charitable organizations and government agencies have built schools and water treatment plants and created farm projects only to discover that their good works did not really fit in with the local scene. Or that one project contradicted another. Schools and water treatment...

MIAMI -- It was long, long ago that the hills and steep, craggy mountains of Haiti were covered in rich, green forests. One by one the trees had been turned into firewood by a poor people on their way to

MIAMI--Long before the earthquake, Haiti was mired in a crisis that only a few experts noticed - a severe lack of clean drinking water.
The country's 10 million people had drinking water from springs and rivers and wells and a broken-down municipal water system in...

MIAMI-- The drought that just ended in Texas was not an example or a reflection of climate change. Neither were the unusual, near-freezing temperatures in South Florida.

How confusing. You hear so much about climate change. Then you see what looks like evidence of the phenomenon....

MIAMI--Hollywood star Jessica Biel, the pop singer-song writer Kenna, the hip-hoppers Lupe Fiasco and Santigold and half dozen friends are climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in East Africa as the new year begins as a way of drawing...