Meter-Made Crusade

Midway between the lair of the Bengal tigers and the stamping ground of the African elephants at the San Francisco Zoo is an attraction more commonly seen along city sidewalks: a parking meter. But drop a quarter in and you get a lot more than 30 minutes of parking time. When a donor turns the handle of the modified meter, a mechanical red-throated hummingbird flies across a jungle scene, signaling that the donation will be used to save a small plot of tropical rain forest.

The Conservation Meter was the brainchild of zookeeper Norman Gershenz, who came up with the notion while feeding the koalas one day. "It creates a link between the wild and what's going on in the city zoos," he says, and it offers zoogoers the opportunity to "do something immediately" for endangered habitats.

A vividly hued sign on the meter offers a sense of the impact of the coins, which go to La Amistad National Park in Costa Rica. Each hectare (2.5 acres) preserved, reads the sign, will save 500 butterflies, 200 orchids, 10,000 mushrooms, 20 frogs, half a parrot and a thousandth of a jaguar. The message seems to make a deep impression on budding environmentalists. "It's really neat," says Lily Lubin, 9, who persuaded her parents to part with some change. "It feels like every time I put a quarter in, I'm saving an animal's life."

A second conservation meter has popped up at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and zoos and aquariums in more than 20 other cities, including Seattle and Philadelphia, have requested the machines, which were developed with financial backing from the Virginia-based Nature Conservancy. If each of the 1 million annual visitors to the San Francisco Zoo gave 25 cents, the $250,000 could purchase more than 800 hectares of rain forest. Nationwide, more than 120 million annual zoo visitors could save 100,000 hectares a year. Impressive though that sounds, it will take many more quarters to reverse the fate of the rain forests, which are disappearing at the rate of 20 hectares a minute.