Word: ecosystems
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...like nature's waste lots, ripe for occupation and improvement. Even the word desert implies "unoccupied." But despite the shortage of water and wide temperature fluctuations, deserts are the host of a wide variety of species, each of which has adapted in its way to life in a desert ecosystem. Couch's spadefoot toads can live underground for much of their lives, awaiting some moisture before they come up and breed. Saguaro cacti are able to suck up a ton of water from one rain shower and then do without more rain for a year. Sidewinder rattlesnakes move across dunes...
...bottle. Diamond uses archaeological data to meticulously piece together its decline. Despite its current denuded state, it turns out that Easter Island was at one time home to the largest species of palm tree in the world. It seems the Easter Islanders overtaxed their tiny home's unusually fragile ecosystem. Once they chopped down all the palms, they couldn't make canoes to go fishing in, and soil erosion devastated any attempts at agriculture. "The further consequences," Diamond observes dispassionately, "start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism." You can imagine where they end. Diamond interprets...
...hard to think of anyone or anything less urgently in need of parody than Jacques Cousteau, the saintly French oceanographer whose underseas documentaries, from the '50s through the '80s, did so much to make the world aware of the beauty and fragility of our watery ecosystem. But the sheer audacity of this basic joke--its awesome satiric irrelevance--is the crucial thing about The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. If you go with it, you'll love the film. If you don't, you'll just sit there wondering how (and why) Wes Anderson, the director and a co-writer...
...borne energy hardships for 80 years without harvesting the oil from this beautiful preserve. We survived the oil embargo of the 1970s without extracting oil from the Western Arctic Reserve. The fact that oil prices have risen in the last few years does not justify destroying such a sizable ecosystem...
After the fall of Hussein’s regime, the Marsh Arabs tore down the dams. The restoration of the marshlands has since sparked international commitments to restore the marsh ecosystem and economy...