Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Russia's oil fields are in dire need of rehabilitation; Sakhalin's north and much of Siberia are littered with rusting derricks ringed by porous labyrinths of old pipelines. Local environmentalists, pointing to the recent spill near the Galapagos Islands, worry about the potential damage to Sakhalin's rich ecosystem caused by toxic drilling waste...
...conflicts (e.g., over subsidies for the new monster Airbus that may do in Boeing's 747). These items galvanize the worst fears of the Europeans. They have a single name: American unilateralism. Nor should their alarm be shrugged off as routine babble of the smaller denizens of the international ecosystem. Those who live with an elephant have a right to worry when it starts ambling. More to the point, your allies have marked up all your foreign-policy speeches, including the transcript of your 75-minute TV interview before the Inauguration, and they are not amused...
...satellite imagery to show the extent of the burning in 1988. Out-of-control burning first brought me to Brazil in 1989 when I wrote the cover story for the Sept. 18 issue of Time called ?Torching the Amazon.? I have made several trips to parts of this giant ecosystem in neighboring countries since then, but this was my first trip back to the Brazilian Amazon, and there was, amid the rising cause for concern, some good news to report...
...decade ago, for instance, few people would have predicted that in the year 2000, the huge state of Amazonas, next door to Par?, would be the least deforested region in the ecosystem?especially since in earlier administrations the Governor, Amazonino Mendes, had offered to hand out chain saws to anyone wanting one, in order to spur land clearing. (In recent years, Mendes has adopted a slightly softer approach toward the forest.) Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, has grown rapidly in wealth and size in the past 10 years, but without massive tree cutting in surrounding areas. Local soils are notoriously...
...rain forest is not good agricultural land, to put it mildly: the very nature of the ecosystem is to recycle organic matter without enriching the underlying soil. Once cleared, the acidic dirt of the forest floor is exhausted after a few harvests. That in turn causes peasant farmers to keep moving and sell their barren holdings to cattle ranchers looking to buy cleared land on the cheap. So the devastation continues to creep forward. All over the Amazon, I saw vast areas of degraded land where before there was a virtually unbroken expanse of trees. In all, the Amazon contains...