Word: basins
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...from its decision to pave over those 435 miles, the last unfinished portion of a highway called BR-163. That will create a 1,080-mile chain of asphalt going past the Tapajos National Forest and linking the Amazon River with southern Brazil. As has happened throughout the Amazon basin, the completion of the highway will open the forest to settlers, and they will undoubtedly set fires to clear land near the road. This area, however is regularly hit by drought and is perhaps the most vulnerable part of the forest. Fires here could grow into the worst conflagration...
...destination was a tiny area in the midst of the Amazon basin, a few hectares of land in the middle of a preserve called the Tapaj?s National Forest, 67 km south of Santar?m in the Brazilian state of Par?. After a tooth-loosening ride along a cratered, flooded jungle road and a short but slippery hike into the 25-year-old preserve, I finally got to my goal?a surreal scene in the heart of the rain forest. As far as the eye could see, transparent plastic tents covered the forest floor, which was crisscrossed by a complicated network...
...government, along with others, is exploring every opportunity to find profit in standing forest. In fact, with the world increasingly alarmed about global warming, state governments in the Amazon see a potential gold mine in the use of virgin forest as a storehouse for atmospheric carbon. The Amazon Basin releases between 100 million and 300 million tons of carbon a year into the atmosphere through deforestation; the amount doubles in years when fires devastate the forest. The U.N.-sponsored greenhouse-gas agreement, worked out in Kyoto in 1998 to combat the threat of climate change (not yet ratified...
...system that will make almost any product, anywhere, anytime. Well, at least anything that can be molded--which is just about everything we touch these days. Kirila's Virtual Engineered Composites (VEC) process is a factory in a box. The box can be as small as a mop basin or as big (so far) as a 40-ft. freight container. Plopped down in the middle of Azerbaijan or Arizona or Angola, it could start pushing out toilet seats one day and pipeline sections the next...
...sneaker since then has gone through changes. It has specialized, subdividing into varieties for walking, tennis, basketball, running and something called "cross-training." The sneaker industry has ingested steroids and hallucinogens, and produced astonishing effects, shoes that look like cumulus clouds, or reptiles of the Amazon basin, or tarted-up space stations. Shoes have Incredible Hulked themselves (or perhaps, Robert Crumbed themselves) to assert an out-of-perspective importance - rendering the foot (an absurd appendage anyway and best underplayed) ridiculously prominent, strange shapes elaborated by irrational patchworks of neon piping and gaudy metallic iridescences...