Word: fauna
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...impossible. Even Adams' fervent admirers admit that he can be spotty: at best an artful cataloguer of flora and fauna, at worst a windy sentimentalist. Memorable passages occur only when his imagination roosts among furry creatures or in the mid-regions of myth. Give him anything more difficult to chew on than a bone, and things fall apart. The story of Rowf and Snitter is glutted with just such indigestibles...
...weather, how pollution is gradually depleting valuable fisheries and destroying salt marshes where sea birds breed. Its last important section is a series on the world's major ocean areas, tracking origins of the warm Mediterranean Sea and the frigid Arctic Ocean, assaying values of flora, fauna and inanimate components of the marine world, outlining what must be done to preserve and protect them...
...chimera, the griffin, the manticore and the sphinx are familiar fauna that flourish outside traditional biology. Now it appears that unfamiliar flora grow outside of conventional botany. Or so says the protean Leo Lionni, 67, teacher, painter, sculptor, former art director of FORTUNE and author of a dozen delightful children's books. To illustrate, Lionni has literalized Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"-and then removed the toads. What remains is a series of never-were "parallel plants," a vegetable kingdom with members rooted beyond the fences of nature and logic...
...must combat desertification, agreed. But some deserts need to be protected from man. For instance, one of the world's most remarkable deserts: the geographically confined Namib. Its flora and fauna are unrivaled, in part because of the great diversity of ultra-psammophilous adaptations. It is a great pity, therefore, that the South West African department of water affairs is now hellbent on pumping dry the underground water resources of the Kuiseb River to satisfy the corporate hunger for uranium...
...potential broader social or ethical implications of initiating this line of research--of its role, as a possible prelude to longer-range, broader-scale genetic engineering of the fauna and flora of the planet including ultimately, man...Shall we take into our hands our own future evolution...