Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...promising start is being made in Colorado, where Ecologist George Van Dyne is running a key project under the International Biological Program to discover how a grasslands ecosystem responds to various stresses. Van Dyne and 80 other scientists are trailing every imaginable creature on the Western prairie and gathering data for a computer-modeling scheme that may become a landmark in ecological forecasting...
...subversive science." Only 70 years old, it avoids the narrow specialization of other sciences?and thus appeals to generalists, including people with a religious sense. Ecology is the systems approach to nature, the study of how living organisms and the nonliving environment function together as a whole or ecosystem. The word ecology (derived from the Greek root oikos, meaning "house") is often used in ways that suggest an attitude rather than a discipline. Anthropologists and psychiatrists have adapted it to their work. Poet Allen Ginsberg declaims it like a revolutionary slogan. But few yet grasp its subtle meanings?as Senator...
Stevens missed the whole point: the arctic ecosystem is full of life (including Eskimos) but is so vulnerable to pollution that the North Slope threatens to become a classic example of man's mindless destruction. The intense cold impedes nature's ability to heal itself; tire marks made in the tundra 25 years ago are still plainly visible. What most worries ecologists, in fact, is man's blindness to his own utter dependency on all ecosystems, such as oceans, coastal estuaries, forests and grasslands. Those ecosystems constitute the biosphere, a vast web of interacting organisms and processes that form...
...process is governed by distinct laws of life and balance. One is adaptation: each species finds a precise niche in the ecosystem that supplies it with food and shelter. At the same time, all animals have the defensive power to multiply faster than their own death rates. As a result, predators are required to hold the population within the limits of its food supply. The wolf that devours the deer is a blessing to the community, if not to the individual deer. Still another law is the necessity of diversity. The more different species there are in an area...