Word: archipelagos
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...decades later, the field is trying to catch up with him. Vitousek's studies of the Hawaiian Islands--the world's most remote archipelago and a place humans discovered only 1,500 years ago--have yielded some intriguing findings. While the arrival of new species has had the greatest impact on Hawaii's unique flora and fauna, what amazed Vitousek was how the world reaches out to touch even the most remote spots. In one celebrated study, he and his colleagues analyzed soil and rock chemistry at volcanic sites ranging from 300 years to 4.1 million years old. Plants...
...Japan, then the U.S. after World War II, and then Japan again in 1972. Its main island, called Okinawa like the rest of the prefecture, is home to no less than 38 U.S. military facilities. And yet tourists and dream-seekers from the Japanese mainland flock to the archipelago's 60 tropical islands precisely for its slice of red, white and blue, an ethos Okinawa cultivates. Reminders of Uncle Sam abound?America Mart, America Hotel and Club America. Restaurants offer steak, ice cream and hybrid dishes like taco rice. Military surplus stores sell American flak jackets, dog tags, camouflage pants...
...nation, will fall apart just as Wahid's presidency did. The country is in deep trouble. It is emerging painfully from 32 years of the Suharto dictatorship, an era of forced social engineering and epic plunder. As the center collapses, ancient tribal and religious feuds have revived across the archipelago of 13,000 islands; 3,500 died in the violence last year. Unemployment is estimated at 40%, while corruption and economic bungling have kept foreign investment at "sub-zero," as a diplomat puts it. Most worrying of all, many observers in Jakarta doubt that Megawati, who owes her ascension...
Meanwhile, in the far-flung islands of the archipelago, Indonesians are starting to thumb their noses at Jakarta. Squatters invade mines and plantations, nobody pays taxes, smuggling is rampant, and murders go unpunished. Since February, some Dayak tribesmen in central Kalimantan have kept the heads they cut off Madurese migrants as trophies of magic power. Indonesia has more than 1.2 million refugees from ethnic violence. Says sociologist Paulus Wirutomo: "There's a hate being kept alive in our culture. We have to get rid of this." Wahid tried but failed. And Megawati...
...Indonesia matters, and Indonesia is a mess. Measured by population, it is the world's fourth largest country, and a decade ago it would have been counted among Asia's most important economies. Spanning the oceans from Thailand to Australia, the 14,000-island archipelago serves as a kind of geopolitical tollgate to the Pacific. The Japanese occupied it in World War II, and its strategic significance was underlined in the early 1960s when it became the theater of perhaps the bloodiest-ever proxy war between China and the United States...