Word: ecosystems
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...shellfish and other marine life. Known for their collections of picturesque coral and nourishing sea grasses, the Caribbean's shallow coastal waters are a rich breeding ground for sea life, ranging from shrimp, mollusks and crustaceans to numerous varieties of finfish. Any major disturbance of this fragile ecosystem could have far-reaching repercussions. Unfortunately, as Rodriguez Mercado notes, there is little awareness of the economic importance of these resources. Few officials seem willing to trade off the immediate payoff of a new hotel for the long-term benefits of a protected reef or thriving coastal estuary...
...League. To be sure, there is no way to calculate the dollar value of the view from a mountaintop, the solitude of a forest or the airy freedom provided by a piece of open land near a crowded city. There is no way to put a price on an ecosystem that is destroyed to make way for a shopping center or a high-rise apartment...
...contain or limit it, much less win it. The dynamic of spontaneous, irreversible escalation would quickly destroy all the well-laid plans of the war games and the "doctrines" of the political leaders, just as it would destroy almost everything else-not just civilization, but much of the ecosystem as well, sparing only certain lower orders of flora and fauna that seem peculiarly able to survive in a radio active environment. Hence the title of the first of three sections in the book: "A Republic of Insects and Grass...
...moralistic, a sort of participatory nastiness. But does it play a heroic moral role hitherto unnoticed? Is gossip merely a swamp that breeds mosquitoes and disease? ("Each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies," wrote Tennyson.) Or does it have higher functions in the ecosystem...
Even if man only cared for himself and saw beasts and plants as objects to deal with, he should reconsider how he wants to exploit them. Clearing a forest to heat homes for only a year may serve many, but in the long run, that forest and the ecosystem that died with it might have been more valuable to man for quality-of-life reasons. Man should strive for more than just propagating his species; he should also improve the quality of each life. To maintain our numbers and increase them, eradication of other species would probably be necessary...