Word: evens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fearful of being frozen out of a revitalized European Community, nonmembers like Austria and Norway are considering joining the club, and even neutral Switzerland is worried about being left standing on the platform as the 1992 train pulls out of the station. East European countries are cozying up to the Community via bilateral trade and aid deals while Moscow watches with envious desire. "What is going on in Western Europe is a serious challenge for us," says Vitali Zhurkin, director of the Soviet Academy of Science's recently created Institute for Europe. "It is a positive process that shows...
...than 1,000 tributaries, meanders for 4,000 miles, a length second only to the Nile's 4,100 miles. No other river compares in volume: every hour the Amazon delivers an average of 170 billion gal. of water to the Atlantic -- 60 times the flow of the Nile. Even 1,000 miles upriver, it is often impossible to see from one side of the Amazon to the other...
...when stripped of its trees, the land becomes inhospitable. Most of the Amazon's soil is nutrient poor and ill suited to agriculture. The rain forest has an uncanny capacity to flourish in soils that elsewhere would not even support weeds...
...abandoned fields wind up in the hands of ranchers and speculators who have access to capital. Thanks to tax breaks and subsidies, these groups can often profit from the land even when their operations lose money. According to Roberto Alusio Paranhos do Rio Branco, president of the Business Association of the Amazon, nobody would farm Rondonia without government incentives and price supports for cocoa and other crops...
...forests goes on much longer, the damage may become irreversible. Long before the great rain forests are destroyed altogether, the impact of deforestation on climate could dramatically change the character of the area, lead to mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and leave Brazil's poor to endure even greater misery than they do now. The people of the rest of the world, no less than the Brazilians, need the Amazon as a functioning system, and in the end, this is more important than the issue of who owns the forest. The Amazon may run through South America...