Word: forester
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Diversity is the raw material of earth's wealth, but nature's true creativity lies in the relationships that link various creatures. The coral in a reef or the orchid in a rain forest is part of an ecosystem, a fragile, often delicately balanced conglomeration of supports, checks and balances that integrate life-forms into functioning communities. Given the complex workings of an ecosystem, it is never clear which species, if any, are expendable...
...tropics the crucial question is how large a forest must be to sustain itself. If a park or protected area is too small to support some of its animal and plant life, the ecosystem will decline even with protection. As yet, no one knows the minimum critical size of a rain forest, but in 1979 Thomas Lovejoy, now at the Smithsonian Institution, set up a 20-year experiment with the cooperation of the Brazilian government to determine just that for the Amazon region. Among the findings: the smaller the forest, the faster the decline of insects, birds and mammals...
...cause of preservation. Governments should force local lending institutions to review the environmental consequences of proposed loans. No bank, for example, should be allowed to lend a company money to set up a cattle ranch if the operation would destroy too large a section of an endangered forest...
...enormous egg whose parts separated into earth and sky, yin and yang. The Greeks believed Gaia, the earth, was created immediately after Chaos and gave birth to the gods. In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate...
This week's unorthodox choice of Endangered Earth as Planet of the Year, in lieu of the usual Man or Woman of the Year, had its origin in the scorching summer of 1988, when environmental disasters -- droughts, floods, forest fires, polluted beaches -- dominated the news. By August TIME knew it was no longer enough just to describe familiar problems one more time. "The new journalistic challenge," says managing editor Henry Muller, "was to help / find solutions, and that by definition meant international solutions." So we invited a distinguished group of scientists, administrators and political leaders from five continents...