Word: dooms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Samuel Johnson once wrote, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully." The threat of impending ecological doom seems to be having the same effect on public opinion. If historians remember 1989 as the year the Iron Curtain collapsed, it has also been the year that concern for the environment reached a new peak...
...worldwide concern for the environment grows, and some promising initiatives take shape, TIME reports on recent progress and outlines a concrete agenda for action by the U.S. Government, companies and consumers. A look at the scientific naysayers who dispute forecasts of doom and gloom. A preview of Earth...
...price paid for saving Philippine democracy, however, could one day doom it. The political situation is a shambles. A drive to win new foreign investment is now likely to be aborted. Worst of all, though U.S. jets may have flown the colors of liberty, their intervention was a psychological blow to the Filipinos...
...best when McKibben explains the consequences of his "end of nature." Although not a scientist, he writes clearly and perceptively about several reasonably esoteric subjects--from genetic engineering to the recently-discovered hole in the Antarctic ozone layer. Although his explanations of global warming may seem doom-laden, they contain enough hard facts to give even the least environmentally aware person a serious jolt...
Even so, the relative handling of the stories amounts to a blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling...