Word: drought
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Much of the Midwest is reeling from days of persistent rain and flooding. But there's at least one silver lining - or, perhaps, a golden one: For many on the storm's fringes, even a slight dose of rain is offering relief from the summer's drought...
...much of the summer, Art Bunting says "it was getting dry" near his corn and soybean farm in Dwight, Ill., about 80 miles southeast of Chicago. Between the drought and rising demand for corn to produce ethanol, "some people were worried we weren't going to grow enough corn," he says. Now, however, it's a different story. During next month's harvest, Bunting says he expects a higher yield of corn - partly because he increased the amount of acres he's devoted to the crop, but also because the recent "good weather" has helped kernels of corn get plumper...
...beer smuggled behind the grandstand, cigarettes sneaked in the woods, curfews broken because it's too hot to sleep. The flip side of summer freedom is anarchy, the structures of school and work melted into casual Fridays and long weekends spent playing on grass now baked to beige by drought, if it has not been drowned by this summer's biblical floods...
...million kg) a year to clog landfills. Worst of all, the migration to bottled water fosters a perception that tap water isn't safe or necessary. That's dangerous at a time when aging public-water systems need investment, particularly as global warming increases the incidence of drought. Says Gigi Kellett, director of the Think Outside the Bottle campaign for the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International: "An entire generation is growing up thinking they have to get their water out of a bottle...
...about travel, about trivial things. Then somehow I bring up cocoa and the impact of financialization on some of the soft-commodity markets, and she straightens up and squints down at me, launching into some quick attributes of cocoa to test my knowledge. Cocoa production is down because of drought in West Africa, and there is fear of renewed fighting in Ivory Coast, the world's largest producer. Meanwhile, Haugerud says, "demand continues to be strong across the board, along with new demand for dark chocolate because of the health benefits of flavanols. Dark-chocolate sales in Britain alone...