Word: biota
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...monitored pumping that can be dialed back the moment evidence of harm comes to light. But in the desert there's not a lot of margin for error, and a chronic water imbalance can be environmentally devastating. Robert Hershler, a taxonomist at the Smithsonian Institution, has combed through the biota of hundreds of springs in the Great Basin region, including Snake Valley, and has discovered more than 100 new species of spring snails, some of which are confined to a single location. "If their spring dries up, these snails are gone for good," he observes. "They can never come back...
...than a dollar a day. The problem is particularly severe in sub-Saharan Africa. There, deadly diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are on the rise. The quality of physical environments is in many instances on a path to ruin, reflecting unsustainable demands on soils, waters, and the biota imposed by peoples driven to survive in the present without the luxury of planning for the future. It is a sad fact that aspirations for poverty alleviation and environmental protection are often antithetical. Added to this, the toll from disasters, natural and man-made, is in many cases catastrophic...
...would, indeed, have been quite within the technical abilities of the Romans of Pliny's day to develop the depths of the Mediterranean and to explore its biota, though of course examination of the temperature and salinities of the sea must in any case have awaited the development of the sciences of physics and chemistry as we now know them...
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