Word: barrenness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they converge on Houston this weekend for the 16th Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations. Their visit will be attended by Wild West fanfare and reported by more than 3,000 journalists, but is any real work likely to get done? Many past summits, in fact, produced results as barren as the North Texas Panhandle. If the chief executives of the world's most powerful economies simply spend three days hammering out a pious communique and frolicking at rodeos and barbecues, then maybe this form of junket should ride off into the sunset...
...realm currently specified by Senator Al Gore. "The environment has become a question of national security," says Gore. Indeed, environmental threats are the most analogous to military ones, and it's easy enough to stretch national security's original intent in this direction. "Environmental refugees" fleeing from homelands ! made barren by shattered ecosystems are poignantly reminiscent of fugitives from the plains of war. Social instability, breeder of violence, is a spreading by-product of desertification and deforestation in lands as far apart as the Philippines and Egypt...
...enough at the start of the play, with its mottled sky, its rich backdrops and proliferation of Druidic carvings, but the self-conscious surrealism begins to pall before long. In addition, the props are all concentrated at the back and sides of the stage, leaving an expanse of unrelieved, barren floor space in the middle...
...rises like a fiery red ball from the blue-black depths of the Arabian Sea. As darkness retreats across the Hajar mountains, the barren landscape changes from gray-brown to beige and copper. It is the birth of a new day in the Sultanate of Oman, a legendary home of Sinbad the Sailor and fabled source of frankincense for the Queen of Sheba. In this New Mexico-size nation, located on the cutting edge of the Arabian Peninsula, the dawn light- and-shadow show is a spectacular curtain raiser to a host of attractions + that have made...
...Nobody could call the view of Cotopaxi dull, but when Church saw it in 1853, it completely lacked the palms, writhing creepers, streams and waterfalls he would later give it. "The big mountain," he wrote to a friend, "grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial...