Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Diversity is the raw material of earth's wealth, but nature's true creativity lies in the relationships that link various creatures. The coral in a reef or the orchid in a rain forest is part of an ecosystem, a fragile, often delicately balanced conglomeration of supports, checks and balances that integrate life-forms into functioning communities. Given the complex workings of an ecosystem, it is never clear which species, if any, are expendable...
...best place to preserve the earth's biodiversity is in the ecosystems that gave rise to it. Man must abandon the belief that the natural order is mere stuff to be managed and domesticated, and accept that humans, like other creatures, depend on a web of life that must be disturbed as little as possible...
...generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever...
...forever. At the outside limit, the earth will probably last another 4 billion to 5 billion years. By that time, scientists predict, the sun will have burned up so much of its own hydrogen fuel that it will expand and incinerate the surrounding planets, including the earth. A nuclear cataclysm, on the other hand, could destroy the earth tomorrow. Somewhere within those extremes lies the life expectancy of this wondrous, swirling globe. How long it endures and the quality of life it can support do not depend alone on the immutable laws of physics. For man has reached a point...
Through most of his 2 million years or so of existence, man has thrived in earth's environment -- perhaps too well. By 1800 there were 1 billion human beings bestriding the planet. That number had doubled by 1930 and doubled again by 1975. If current birthrates hold, the world's present population of 5.1 billion will double again in 40 more years. The frightening irony is that this exponential growth in the human population -- the very sign of homo sapiens' success as an organism -- could doom the earth as a human habitat...