Word: ecosystems
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...biologist Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, hopes to ensure the great cat's survival. She sees it as a test case of whether human development and wildlife habitats can coexist. "If we can save the cheetah here," says Marker, "we are talking about saving an entire ecosystem. We can save the world...
That was the thinking behind the launching of the most ambitious study of global ecosystems ever undertaken. In September, at a special millennial session of the U.N., four of its agencies and partners--the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. Environment Program and the World Resources Institute--will present the first results of this project, a Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems. The findings of the $4 million study, called PAGE for short, will be published in the 2000-01 edition of the World Resources Report titled People and Ecosystems: The Fraying Web of Life. PAGE will also...
...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...
...think, find the inner will to wake up to our current situation, to see the grimmer outlook around the corner and to choose to do something about it. We can stabilize our numbers and temper our patterns of consumption. We can work to stem the tide of ecosystem destruction and species loss. We can, in short, see ourselves for what we have become: the first global economic entity, a fascinating state arrived at through no end of cleverness but a state that is ultimately limited by the health and productivity of the natural system in which we live...