Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WINGS OF DESIRE An angel, whose job it is to listen to the cries of human misery, falls to earth and falls in love. This astringent romantic fairy tale, from director Wim Wenders and novelist Peter Handke, imagines a West Berlin languishing in heartache and itching for spiritual redemption. It's funny...
Even the mass extinctions 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and countless other species did not significantly affect flowering plants, according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. But these plant species are disappearing now, and people, not comets or volcanoes, are the angels of destruction. Moreover, the earth is suffering the decline of entire ecosystems -- the nurseries of new life-forms. For that reason, Wilson deems this crisis the "death of birth." British ecologist Norman Myers has called it the "greatest single setback to life's abundance and diversity since the first flickerings of life almost 4 billion...
...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...
...interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes, other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth's species to survive...
Only 1.7 million of the estimated 5 million to 30 million different life- forms on earth have been cataloged. Since hundreds of thousands of species may be extinct by the year 2000, the world has neither the scientists nor the time to identify the yet uncounted. "It's as though the nations of the world decided to burn their libraries without bothering to see what is in them," said University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel Janzen at the TIME conference. Harvard's Wilson called this profligacy the "folly" that future generations are least likely to forgive...