Word: forested
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...procession of multitudes, as well as with crime and squalor, and those that tend toward an appreciation of serene majesty, passivity, mystery, solitude, pastoral virtues and a different kind of wildness. Both worlds are beautiful--city lamps on a winter night are no less attractive than a swaying kelp forest. The trouble is that nature usually loses in this tug-of-war, in part because it cannot compete in modern terms. Nature is undemocratic; in the wilds, wet or dry, the individual has no dignity. The strong eat the weak, and all one's humanistic ideals of equality and justice...
...more than 40 years, earth has been sending out distress signals. At first they were subtle, like the thin shells of bald-eagle eggs that cracked because they were laced with DDT. Then the signs were unmistakable, like the pall of smoke over the Amazon rain forest, where farmers and ranchers set fires to clear land. Finally, as the new millennium drew near, it was obvious that Earth's pain had become humanity's pain. The collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery put 30,000 Canadians out of work and ruined the economies of 700 communities. Two years...
Ecosystems are naturally resilient, but human impact can reduce their ability to bounce back in many ways. Rain forests withstand some degree of cutting, for instance, but once forest fragments shrink beyond some unknown threshold, the entire system loses its ability to recover. page refers to a recent study led by the University of Michigan's Lisa Curran, who contends that human activities such as logging may have doomed Indonesia's great dipterocarp trees, the anchor of its rain forests...
...trees reproduce by releasing huge masses of fruit in a synchronized fashion that is designed by nature to overwhelm the appetites of fruit and seedeaters and ensure that there are always some seeds left over to sprout. The strategy, called masting, worked for millions of years. Now, however, the forests in Borneo have been so reduced that humans and animals can consume all the dipterocarp fruit, with the result that no new dipterocarp trees are taking root in the areas studied by Curran and her colleagues. Since a host of creatures ranging from the orangutan to the boar are dependent...
...escaping into the atmosphere. Trees are also important recyclers of moisture to the atmosphere. In some parts of the Amazon basin, deforestation has reached the point where it is altering precipitation patterns. This is because so much of the moisture entrained by clouds comes from the canopy of the forest below; as large tracts of trees disappear, so do portions of the aqueous reservoir that feeds the local rainmaking machine...