Word: cheapness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...topsoil. "In 50 years," says one observer, "New England could look like Lebanon." President Nick Muller of Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., has another sort of woodburning in mind. He wants to build a $1.75 million central heating plant fueled by sawdust from nearby sawmills. Sawdust is cheap, burns cleanly and has much heating power. Muller, a historian, is thankful that he studied engineering for a time since he has had to transform himself into a heating and weatherizing expert who can now discuss R-values* as succinctly as Vermont history, his specialty. In the winter...
...fact, any large building erected during the late 1950s or '60s is likely to be an oil-thirsty white elephant, particularly the glass-box skyscrapers that sprouted in New York and other big cities. "Cheap oil made us very lazy," admits the illustrious Philip Johnson, 73, who with the equally illustrious Mies van der Rohe designed Manhattan's Seagram Building. Conceived by their creators as formal abstractions, such austere structures bore out the "less is more" precept in an unintended way: they used far more heating and cooling energy than the buildings they replaced. Now owners are scrambling to make...
Economic expansion, which depends on cheap fuel, is slowing almost everywhere. Taiwan's growth has declined from 12% last year to 8%, and South Korea's from 12.5% to 6%. Oil-fueled inflation is raging. Taiwan's wholesale prices rose 3.5% last year, but are expected to jump 16% this year; at least ten points of the total are directly attributable to increased energy costs. Many Third World leaders echo Kenya's Kibaki: "We have had to postpone vitally needed development projects. We are not importing any nonessentials...
Gita Mehta's witty documentary satire illustrates that the cost can be considerably higher. This is especially true for the thousands of Europeans and Americans who have flocked to the Indian subcontinent in search of enlightenment, cheap dope and, like the Californian who turned her sadhana into a course on "inner environments," opportunity. As reckoned by the Hindus and Gore Vidal, this dark, chaotic age of Kali seethes with confusions, corruption and misapprehension. Karma, for example, a rather severe concept of determinism, has been turned into a metaphysical jelly bean by hippies, shopping-center swamis and jet-lagged gurus...
...Register's circulation has declined some in recent years, mostly because fewer families find they can afford it along with their local evening paper. It is also being pinched hard by inflation and high energy costs. "The newspaper was built on the idea of cheap gas, cheap newsprint and cheap reporters," says Gartner. "It's a new game now." Fortunately, though, the paper can count on some old and deep loyalties. Explains Reporter David Yepsen: "The Register is part of the Iowa experience, like tall corn and snow days home from school...