Word: canalized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...personal favorite among Republican contenders for the '88 race; the former President felt Baker would restore "hardheaded detente" to U.S.-Soviet relations. As Senate minority leader in 1978, Baker earned the enmity of the right, including Ronald Reagan, for supporting the treaties ceding U.S. control over the Panama Canal. As majority leader during Reagan's first term, Baker labeled the President's supply-side economic proposals "a riverboat gamble" and was lukewarm toward proposals to ban abortion and require prayer in schools. Nevertheless, he loyally proclaimed himself the President's "spear carrier" in the Senate and helped push through...
...problem is that the dense tropical rain forest that blanketed the 1,300-sq.-mi. watershed around the route of the canal has been disappearing at an alarming pace, cut away by farmers. By 1950 some 20% of the forest had been cut. Now more than 70% has vanished, and about 800 acres of the remainder is being cleared every year...
Once the trees are gone, denuded slopes are eroded by rainfall, which has been washing soil into 20-sq.-mi. Madden Lake at the rate of half a million tons a year. A study by Hydrologist Luis Alvarado of the Panama Canal Commission shows that silt accumulating at the bottom of the lake has reduced its storage capacity by 5%. By the year 2000 the loss could be as high as 10%, and by 2020 nearly...
...threat to the canal may be worsened by another consequence of deforestation. According to Donald Windsor of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the average annual rainfall in central Panama has decreased by as much as 10% since the turn of the century. "Because of deforestation," he says, "there is less evapotranspiration." And because less water rises into the air in vapor form, less returns in the form of rainfall...
Despite these dire projections, the Panama Canal Commission has reacted coolly. Says David Baerg, the group's environmental and energy-control officer: "We are not in a crisis situation, where things have to be changed immediately." Heckadon disagrees. He has called for the formation of a body like the Tennessee Valley Authority to take charge of the watershed and begin enforcing conservation of the remaining rain forest. "If we don't start acting now," he says, "in 15 years or so we might start having problems...