Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rudyard Kipling notwithstanding, Mandalay has neither flying fishes nor even a bay; Burma's second city sits on an arid plain. For the clergy of the Phaya- gyi monastery, however, the dawn really did come up like thunder one morning last week as government troops raided the 206-year-old pagoda and arrested about 20 of its monks...
...abolished in 1973, the Pentagon adopted the Total Force Policy, placing heavy reliance on the reserves. National Guard units today supply 53% of the Army's potential infantry and 47% of its armored fighting power. Reserves account for nearly all the Army's water-desalting capability, particularly important in arid Saudi Arabia, and 93% of the Navy's cargo- handling capacity...
...suburbanite, few experiences are more wrenching than watching a lush green lawn turn brown and scraggly. All across the increasingly arid U.S. Sunbelt, homeowners are facing that disheartening prospect. Because of persistent droughts and rapid population growth, there is not nearly enough water to keep every plot of grass green. Los Angeles, in the fourth year of a dry spell, recently imposed water rationing, and South Florida, which absorbs as many as 1,000 newcomers a day, has been needing more rain for two years...
...farther one gets from the capital, the more the picture darkens. A lack of proper irrigation machinery severely limits rice production. On Route 1, in the arid border area between Vietnam and the Mekong river, there is virtually no fighting, but poverty is so acute that beggars line the road and try to flag down the occasional passing car. The area just to the north is more prosperous, but government troops at checkpoints along Route 7 often demand money or cigarettes from travelers for permission to continue on a road that is in such disrepair...
...aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter." Is that the reason the three great monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) were born in the desert, the reason that all the specialized deities left the earth and went into the upper air to coalesce into one invisible...