Word: delta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...peaks, Moreno Valley sprawls across the desert floor. While dust devils dance on the shimmering sand, summer heat relentlessly fills all spaces. This is pioneer and pathfinder country, a desert that developers turned into the mother of all real estate opportunities by diverting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the Oroville reservoir, far to the north. This is a place for hardworking parents, with wagon-train hearts, seeking picket-fenced yards, swing sets and quiet streets, for people who can endure temperatures in the 100s and can drive three hours a day to work and back...
...establish a fund to buy habitat for mountain lions, and authorize a bond issue to provide funding for parks and wildlife habitat. But enforcement of these laws has been so ineffectual that some enviros (as they are called in California) have turned to the courts, suing to protect the delta smelt, salmon and other species. More radical groups like Earth First! resort to direct action: blockading logging sites and driving spikes into redwoods so that they will be dangerous...
Because their peaty soils oxidize when exposed to air, delta islands converted to farmland have been sinking, leaving humans and wildlife increasingly vulnerable to flooding in the next earthquake. Giant pumps powerful enough to reverse the flow of the Sacramento River stun and kill young striped bass and other fish. Encroaching urbanization, flooding, and conversion of marshes to farmland have destroyed 90% of the state's wetlands, most of which were linked to the estuary. As freshwater is diverted into canals, the zone where freshwater and salt water meet has moved upstream, starving young staghorn sculpin that in turn were...
Another highlight is Hayes's speech about the "gentleman callers" of her youth: the boy that "every girl in the Delta had set her cap for" and the boy who "carried [her] picture on him the night he died." Wingfield's flirtation with the gentleman caller, Jim O'Connor (Glenn Kessler), and his continual open-mouthed inability to get a word in, are also exceptional...
Given the limited amount of government aid for preventive medicine, a few American communities have started up their own public-health-education programs. One of the most promising is in the Mississippi Delta counties of Humphreys and Leflore, where nearly half the primarily black population lives under the national poverty line. Three years ago, the Freedom from Hunger Foundation joined two state agencies to create the Partners for Improved Nutrition and Health. The program enlists volunteers, such as Bertha Thurman, to serve as health advisers in their communities. After completing a 10-week training course, Thurman has become a crucial...