Word: breeder
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Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries -- although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture...
Bent Skovmand is not exactly a household name, but he has more to do with the welfare of the earth's 5 billion people than many heads of state. As a plant breeder at CIMMYT, the internationally funded agricultural research station in El Batan, Mexico, he spends his days in silent battle with threats to the world's wheat crop. Recently Skovmand discovered a rare strain of wheat from eastern Turkey that is resistant to the Russian aphid, an invader that has so far cost American farmers $300 million. By using the Turkish strain to develop hearty new hybrid wheats...
...crops now share genetic material. Most high-yielding wheats and rices derive their short, sturdy stature from just a few ancestors. While these genes may be tough, the genes transferred with them may contain a hidden vulnerability that could allow pests to lay waste to huge areas. Observes plant breeder Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachusetts at Boston: "Imagine what a burglar could do if he got past the front door of a building and found that all the apartments shared the same...
...Three Mile Island spawned new safety regulations. The catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986 set off a public outcry in most of Western Europe, forcing some governments to curtail nuclear programs -- but not France. Five reactors will be added to the national grid in this decade. The Superphenix fast-breeder reactor, a joint venture with Italy and Germany, is working, though it has been dogged by technical problems and will never recover its $4.5 billion development cost...
...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...