Word: ecosystem
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Congratulations on your issue covering Earth Day 2000 and the celebration of the 30th anniversary of this event [SPECIAL EDITION, April-May]. As a marine biologist, I am gravely concerned about the delicate balance of the aquatic ecosystem and how it will be affected by global warming. I was appalled, however, by the choice of Leonardo DiCaprio to write about global warming. DiCaprio has adopted a facade of "caring" about the environment, but ethically he had no problem starring in a movie like The Beach, for which the production team altered the beach in one of Thailand's most cherished...
...ecosystem's intricate, interdependent webs of life are hard to restore once they have become frayed. The U.S. is learning this lesson in its multibillion-dollar effort to halt the decline of the Everglades, the "river of grass" that once covered 4,500 sq. mi. (11,700 sq km) in Florida. Having spent much of this century channeling, damming and diverting Everglades water for urban and agricultural use, state and federal politicians have watched with growing alarm as these alterations threw the ecosystem into a tailspin. Wading-bird populations have plummeted; sport and commercial fish catches have fallen...
...removing phosphorus from agricultural runoff, restoring habitats and modifying development plans to reduce stress on the system, but there is no guarantee that even these efforts will bring back the Everglades. The unsettling prospect that the planet's richest nation may not have the wherewithal to restore a vital ecosystem underscores a theme that runs through the U.N. report and should guide development decisions in the coming years: it is far less expensive to halt destructive practices before an ecosystem collapses than it is to try to put things back together later...
...dying in her eyes" and had a change of heart. Discarding the forest-exploitation ideas of his day, he advocated total protection of certain wilderness areas, including predators. Almanac, published posthumously, broadened this notion into what he called "the land ethic," which said in effect that anything harming an ecosystem is "ethically and aesthetically" wrong...
Idechong is not done with his worrying, though. As the government plans to build roads, golf courses and more hotels to boost tourism, he sees more dangers on the horizon for the country's ecosystem. "Palau right now needs visionaries--people who can say what they want Palau to look like 50 years from now, and what we must do now to make that happen." In other words, more people with Idechong's kind of vision...