For thousands of years it was a place of spiritual upliftment where shamans entered trances and etched their visions in stone. Today, the newly opened Wildebeest Kuil Rock Art Site is being used to boost the economy of an uprooted community in South Africa's impoverished Northern Cape province. Located about 10 miles from the diamond-mining town of Kimberley, it is one of the few rock art sites to be opened to the public in South Africa, which boasts some of the finest stone engravings and paintings in the world.

At COP7 in Marrakesh, the Kyoto Protocol was weakened even further--it is, now, the Marrakesh Dilution of the Bonn Compromise to the Kyoto Protocol. Nevertheless, and despite the often-dispiriting nature of Kyoto's loopholes, we believe that the essential situation remains unchanged. Particularly in today's grim international context, the ratification of even this weakened first-generation climate treaty must be counted as a major victory for democratic, multilateral environmental governance. And this remains true despite 9-11, despite the arrival of the U.S.-led "anti-terror coalition," and despite the newly uncertain fate of the Bonn coalition.