Word: aridity
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...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...
With the push of a button at the new Ataturk Dam last week, Turkey's President Turgut Ozal cut the flow of the Euphrates River to Syria and Iraq, his country's arid downstream neighbors, by 75%. The month-long diversion will enable Turkish engineers to fill a reservoir that will be used for irrigation and hydroelectric power...
Range after rocky range, the mountains of northern Nevada soar above the arid flats. From the air their sagebrush cloaks seem as soft as crumpled velvet. Suddenly a series of gigantic holes looms below, so huge that if they were the size of anthills, the ore trucks and bulldozers scurrying over them would be the smallest of ants. "Some people see these holes and think they're hideous," muses John Livermore, a tall, lanky exploration geologist from Reno. "Others think how wonderful it is that man can do something...