Word: fauna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Theroux was bothered less by the terrifying fauna than by many of the people he encountered. The ethnic put-downs of The Happy Isles might be considered racist were it not for the fact that the author is clearly an equal- opportunity disdainer. New Zealanders are shabby and provincial, he complains. Aussies are rude, foulmouthed and drink too much. Tongans are lazy, quarrelsome and mean to their children. Samoans are greedy, hostile and obese, perhaps because their junk-food diet consists mostly of "Cheez Balls" and corned beef saturated with hippo fat. (Did their liking for the latter, Theroux wonders...
...failing to fulfill some of its most important promises. Many conservation areas and national parks exist only on paper. Cattle ranchers, farmers and miners continue to burn, bulldoze and poison the forests. Brazilian environmental agencies still lack the staff and equipment they need to protect endangered flora and fauna. Foreign funds dedicated to Brazilian conservation efforts languish unused because the Collor government, plagued by corruption and staff turnover, has failed to develop projects that would make use of the money...
...pack-rat midden is a snapshot of the flora and fauna existing within about 50 m ((164 ft.)) of the midden at the time it was accumulating," explains Peter Wigand, a paleoecologist at the University of Nevada's Desert Research Institute. Scientists can pin down the approximate time the snapshot was taken by radiocarbon dating of a preserved twig or fecal pellet; the technique can date specimens that are more than 40,000 years old. And by studying middens of different vintages in the same area, researchers can in effect create a movie from a sequence of snapshots, showing changes...
...road to Rio de Janeiro will soon be jammed with thousands of delegates attending the U.N.'s June Earth Summit. As green-minded summiteers ponder such now-or-never topics as global warming, the rain-forest crunch and the world's vanishing flora and fauna, the most endangered species of all may be Rio's street children. A Brazilian child-advocacy group reports that 470 juveniles were murdered in the Rio area last year, many of them by death squads made up of off-duty police hired by local shopkeepers. If the authorities can help it, Rio's most endangered...
...ecosystem; they have learned how to navigate vast distances in the Pacific using their knowledge of currents and the feel of intermittent waves that bounce off distant islands; they have explored the medicinal properties of plants; and they have acquired an understanding of the basic ecology of flora and fauna. If this knowledge had to be duplicated from scratch, it would beggar the scientific resources of the West. Much of this expertise and wisdom has already disappeared, and if neglected, most of the remainder could be gone within the next generation...