Michael Di Paola

Kimberly Wasserman was 21 when her 3-month-old son began to have trouble breathing. Terrified, she brought him to the emergency room and agonized while the infant struggled under an oxygen mask.

In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein diverted the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, then drained and burned the marshes of southern Iraq.

In one corner sat a house built with 300 used aluminum cat-food cans, each stuffed with insulation. Another was made from discarded foam panels, wood and other found materials. It looked like Swiss cheese but accommodated as many as three cats.

Before you see the turtles at the Cayman Turtle Farm on Grand Cayman, you hear them.

At the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in upstate New York, a rooster’s eyes were closed by infection while another was missing tail feathers. Yet both looked healthy and strutted around the coop.

Well before Sandy wreaked havoc on the Atlantic coast, a smaller storm raised concern at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York.

We’re on our way to a house near Midland Beach where a dog and a cat were left behind four days earlier.

The property in Silver Spring, Maryland, has changed little since Rachel Carson lived there 50 years ago when she wrote “Silent Spring,” a powerful indictment of chemical pesticides that pretty much started environmentalism as we know it.

Although his 80-acre Indiana Horse Rescue in the state’s southwestern region is in the grip of drought, Tony Caldwell doesn’t have it too bad. He’s close enough to the Ohio River to partly offset the brutally dry summer of 2012.

I was sitting in a 16-foot skiff with Governor Thomas Patris of the state of Hatohobei, Palau, anchored over Helen Reef. While the governor talked about a new agreement his community has made with OneReef, a U.S. conservation group, Hatohobei Congressman Wayne Andrew was spear-fishing below us.

The second time I met Rita McMahon, she was in her new rescue center for injured wildlife on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The X-ray was horrific, showing a side view of a box turtle that had been impaled by a 6-inch nail running through its back and out the bottom shell.