Five disappearing destinations - get 'em before it's hot
Australia
If you're up for a multi-million-hour plane ride, Australia is a vacation not to be missed. But Australia is also in major trouble, even with envirofox Peter Garrett, of Midnight Oil, as their new minister of the environment. The land Down Under has always been fragile and vulnerable, but as was the story in the arid parts of the American West, nineteenth-century colonists believes that if they simply tried hard enough and irrigated intelligently, it might be possible to make the outback bloom.Now, however, facing warming temps, Australians are having to reconfigure the way that they deal with their environment. Farmers face droughts, cities ration water, and the Great Barrier Reef, haven of vacationing underwater explorers, is fading away because of increased water temperatures. The WWF released a report in 2004 which warned that unless we can keep global temperature rise to under two degrees, the Reef may collapse completely by 2100 and may not be recoverable in the next 500-year time span. (See more pics of Australia's climate issues here, in our gallery.)Getty Images
Apr 7th 2008 @ 1:10PM
Five disappearing destinations - get 'em before it's hot
