Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...world needs ecosystems, but apparently not every ecosystem, everywhere. The genius of the market economy is that it enables a nation to buy from other places or re-create through technology some of the benefits once derived from the local habitat. The genius of nature is that ecosystems can absorb shocks and sustain damage and still rebound...
...dipterocarp fruit, with the result that no new dipterocarp trees are taking root in the areas studied by Curran and her colleagues. Since a host of creatures ranging from the orangutan to the boar are dependent on the dipterocarps, the trees' disappearance may ultimately doom Indonesia's rain-forest ecosystem. PAGE scientist Nigel Sizer of the World Resources Institute notes that similar problems associated with fragmentation loom over all but the largest remaining forests on Earth...
...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...