Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lecture circuit. The reason: in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy International, he is attempting to raise $11.8 million for an unprecedented ecological experiment. Janzen plans to use the money to buy 158 sq. mi. of Costa Rican terrain surrounding Santa Rosa and re-create a virtually extinct ecosystem known as tropical dry forest. He has already named the proposed refuge Guanacaste National Park...
...approves the plan, as is expected, it will go before Congress, where supporters of the two interest groups will clash in earnest. "It is an enormous land-use decision," says Fish and Wildlife Spokesman Phil Million. "At stake is the largest remaining U.S. reserve of oil (and) a fragile ecosystem. The issue will be the environmental battle of the late...
Then, 10,000 or more years ago, man joined forces with nature to maintain the prairie ecosystem. "A spark from an Indian campfire or a bolt of lightning, and the prairie was ablaze," says Northeastern Illinois University Biologist Robert Betz. The fires, Betz explains, were a natural part of the system, favoring the growth of deep-rooted species that could easily survive the repeated conflagrations. A startling variety of plants and flowers flourished under these conditions, their roots creating a dense, interlocking mass that reached as far as twelve feet underground. Between blazes, the prairies teemed with quarry...
While Berger sings the praises of "resource restorers," his account of environmental problems is neither glib nor blindly optimistic. His desciption of the clean-up of the devastated site of a Hooker Chemical Company plant in Michgan tempers hope for restoring a savaged ecosystem with a realistic sense of what can't be done--of political inertia and of the irreparable harm that has already been done...
...Schulenberg has spent years recreating the communities of natural prairie vegetation that once covered the Midwest. He has gathered seed by hand, replanting, and weeding acre by acre to save these species and their ecosystem from extinction. The prairie grasses--which can rejuvenate over-cultivated land, fight erosion, and provide inexpensive grazing fodder and ground cover--were all but wiped out by intensive agriculture and the introduction of non-native species...