Word: ecosystems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thousand cuts." An individual polluter says, "What I alone am doing is not harming this river," which may be so. But Kennedy and Cronin insist the plants that we passed--four in five minutes--are working together, even if they adhere to EPA standards, to slowly destroy the estuary ecosystem...
...problem is that most of Colorado's biggest mountains don't have well-defined trails to the top. So hikers scramble up the slopes any way they can, disrupting the natural drainage systems and trampling the fragile ecosystem--which includes tundra rarely seen in such abundance outside the Arctic. Where once there were rock jasmine and alpine forget-me-nots, there are now deep gullies, muddy lagoons and widespread erosion. "We are loving the Fourteeners to death," laments former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm, who has scaled 49 of them...
...place names attest to this once bucolic setting: the Yard used to actually be a "yard," Cambridge Common a shared pasture where sheep and cattle were grazed. As Harvard matured, red brick replaced the briars, and asphalt smothered up the asphodels. But in spite of the modernization, a modest ecosystem still survives. It cycles away out of sight, invisible, until a hawk swoops down and jolts us from our reverie...
...deeper issue, of course, is what the forests are for. A resource for timber and mining companies? A wilderness where people can hunt, fish or hike? Or an ecosystem supporting the web of life? Dombeck hopes a plan being developed by a committee of scientists will offer a model of multipurpose, sustainable forest management. But pushing that plan through Congress and finding a way to finance it may be jobs so big that even Paul Bunyan couldn't pull them...
...Southern ecosystem just cannot sustain that level of harvest," he said...