Word: fauna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Englishman. What other deity could have created those ripe interfolding fields, that mildly blowing air, that dewy sparkle on the face of a static world? Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what William Wordsworth did to it in verse: he threw out the allegorical fauna that had infested it since Milton and the rococo-nymphs, satyrs, dryads, Vergilian shepherds and Ovidian spring deities-and substituted Natural Vision for the Pathetic Fallacy...
...less damaging are the effects on the rain forest's flora and fauna. Perhaps a hundred of the famed parrots that appear on St. Lucia's stamps are believed to be still left. Conservationists estimate that 40% of the vertebrates that have become extinct around the world in recent years have died off in the Caribbean. Scientists can only guess how many species of plants are permanently gone. Such losses represent a tragic assault on the splendid diversity of terrestrial life. They deprive us of genetic varieties that could have been valuable for any number of purposes, from...
Flood II also seeps through Squid & Spider (Prentice-Hall; $10.95). Guy Billout imagines the passenger list for a new ark: 800,000 insects; 8,580 birds; 6,000 reptiles. On the way, he renders the fauna with his dazzling high-tech style. The text brims with trivia guaranteed to hypnotize the young: crocodiles swallow stones to aid digestion; giraffes give birth standing up; the sperm whale can hold its breath for an hour. No illustration is more comically apropos than the one of St. Nicholas pulled by a sole reindeer. As wolves pursue his sleigh, Santa diverts them by tossing...
Young's love for animals began long before he laid eyes on the assorted fauna of Harvard Square. The son of a New York filmmaker and a free-lance photographer. Young grew up in a family that took under its wing everything from orphaned racoons and birds to stray kinkajous and bush babies, all of whom made ready subjects for photographs. "We never went out and bought anything," Young explains. "We just took in animals we found or that the [Bronx] Zoo unloaded on my sisters who worked there. We only kept them to rehabilitate them and set them free...
...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...