Word: coastal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...foggy afternoon in tiny Arcata, Calif., strollers ambling through coastal marshland seem caught in the colors of an impressionist canvas. As they walk past, sandpipers and pelicans patrol the edge of Humboldt Bay. Just inland, a freshwater swamp is alive with thousands of mallard, teal and pintail ducks. Egrets and herons poke among islands of leathery bulrush. Joggers are framed against fields of daisies and Queen Anne's lace. One walker, former City Councilman Sam Pennisi, proudly points to a sewage pipe spewing dark water into the bay. "This," he tells a visitor, "is what home-rule democracy...
...Kennebunkport met its first metal detector. Bush was to address his friends and neighbors -- folks like Booth Chick and Carl Bartlett -- on the town green, and his security men set one up on Ocean Avenue to screen the audience. He had survived more than 60 summers in this lovely coastal Maine town without a single metal detector, but then he never was President-elect. Trouble was, there were too many people for the lone detector. The police finally said the hell with it, just before Bush began, and let everyone in to hear the speech. "We're going to need...
Nearly every habitat is at risk. Forests in the northern hemisphere have fallen to lumbering, development and acid rain. Marine ecosystems around the world are threatened by pollution, overfishing and coastal development. It is in the tropics, though, that the battle to preserve what scientists call biodiversity will be won or lost. Tropical forests cover only 7% of the earth's surface, but they house between 50% and 80% of the planet's species...
...earth's imperiled state? According to computer projections, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere could drive up the planet's average temperature 3 degrees F to 9 degrees F by the middle of the next century. That could cause the oceans to rise by several feet, flooding coastal areas and ruining huge tracts of farmland through salinization. Changing weather patterns could make huge areas infertile or uninhabitable, touching off refugee movements unprecedented in history...
Shoring up cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London and Rio de Janeiro would require equally monumental measures. In the U.S. the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the cost of protecting developed coastal areas could reach $111 billion. Southern Louisiana, which is losing land to the Gulf of Mexico at the alarming rate of one acre every 16 minutes, has already drawn up an ambitious mix of programs. In the biggest project, a $24 million pumping station would divert millions of gallons of silt-rich Mississippi River water onto the coastline to help stop saltwater intrusion...