Word: fauna
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...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...
Then there are the animal-rights zealots, who sometimes seem to have greater respect for fauna than for their fellow humans. In some bastions of correct thinking, a woman wearing an ermine coat stands more chance of being attacked by an egg-throwing lover of stoats than by a mugger. (The fur-wearing woman's offense would be compounded if she were eating a veal sandwich or carrying a non-biodegradable Styrofoam container of coffee...
...exuberantly colored and gregarious macaws, however, are the celebrity fauna of the region. During a three-hour motorized canoe ride up the Manu River, we saw 327 of the loquacious birds in a scintillating array of colors: red and green, blue and yellow, scarlet. Munn estimates that each macaw in the $ region could generate between $750 and $4,700 a year in tourist revenue -- far more over the bird's lifetime than if the animals were caught and sold...
Start with a lump of rock, add some flora and fauna and before you know it, your little planet's growing out of control. With a program called SimEarth, the whole world's in your hands...