Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...storm. But we're not immune." For another, the region's scarcity of water poses as much of a challenge as it always has. The northern tier of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, with plentiful rivers and low population density, expects no problem satisfying its pockets of growth. The semi-arid southern tier of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, however, has to give water high priority...
...plausible places for early human settlement of the Americas, Pedra Furada, located in a region of dramatic sandstone cliffs in the arid outback of northeastern Brazil, is probably the most exciting -- and most disputed. When archaeologist Niede Guidon of the School for the Advanced Study of Social Sciences in Paris first excavated the site in 1978, she found cave paintings, ash-filled hearths and what she believes are stone tools that are at least 30,000 and perhaps more than 50,000 years old. Says Guidon: "I was the first person to be surprised. I believed the standard theories." Each...
...Magazine, for example, sung in an arid yet passionate rasp, Edwards muses on how literary works have been replaced on people's bookshelves by visually slick magazines featuring everything "from the absurd to the obscene." The haunting, slow-tempo Yellow Brown recalls the cyberpunk film Blade Runner; synthesizer bass notes drip like fat raindrops, and the sounds of droning machinery resonate. Edwards laments ecological destruction caused by technology: "In the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other color bleed into/ Yellow brown. There's nothing to save us from ourselves...
SOMALIA, A SICKLE-shaped expanse on the Horn of Africa, stretches across an unforgiving desert, arid and commanding. For centuries nomads have crossed and recrossed the territory in search of food and water. Akin in language and religion, this homogeneous people should have been destined to live in unity, without the tribal strife that tears apart other African countries. But limited natural resources and internal disputes have historically kept stability at a distance, and the clans of Somalia have regularly battled one another into a state of anarchy...
...foreign artifacts and ideas, but the vast majority of them would never want to live abroad. Those who do emigrate often suffer from chronic homesickness. Though keenly embarrassed by their economic and social backwardness, they believe passionately in the inherent superiority of their own soulfulness when compared with the arid materialism of the West. Ivan Goncharov's classic 19th century novel, Oblomov, presents the ethnic German Stolz as a model of energy and industry, but it is the dreamy Russian Oblomov who handily wins the competition of cultures. It may take Oblomov most of the day just...