Word: forester
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Biologists estimate that more than half the species occur in the tropical rain forests. From these natural greenhouses, many world records of biodiversity have been reported--425 kinds of trees in 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of Brazil's Atlantic forest and 1,300 butterfly species from a corner of Peru's Manu National Park, both more than 10 times the number from comparable sites in Europe and North America. At the other extreme, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, with the poorest and coldest soils in the world, still harbor sparse communities of bacteria, fungi and microscopic invertebrate animals...
...always find what we wanted, but every day there was much more to discover than the traces of our own predecessors. The fossils, some quite complete, others mere fragments, spoke of another world in which the ancestors of many of today's African mammals roamed the rich grasslands and forest fringes between 1.5 million and 2 million years ago. The environment was not too different from the wetter grasslands of Africa today, but it was full of amazing animals that are now long extinct...
...Most ocean pollution doesn't come from ships. It comes from land. Gravity is the sea's enemy. Silt running off dirt roads and clear-cut forest land ruins coral reefs and U.S. salmon rivers. Pesticides and other toxics sprayed into the air and washed into rivers find the ocean. (Midway's albatrosses have in their tissues as much of the industrial chemicals called PCBs as do Great Lakes bald eagles.) The biggest sources of coastal pollution are waste from farm animals, fertilizers and human sewage. They can spawn red tides and other harmful algal blooms that rob oxygen from...
Maybe it's just a response to endless complaints about suburban traffic jams, but U.S. politicians are starting to pay attention to the sprawl problem. Presidential candidate Al Gore has raised the subject, and Maryland Governor Parris Glendening sounds downright alarmed. "Every time we cut down one more forest or sell off another acre of farmland, we have permanently lost more of our finite natural resources," says Glendening. "Sprawl costs taxpayers dollars to support new infrastructure, costs natural resources that we know are not unlimited, and costs us as a society in lost opportunities to invest in our existing communities...
...have helped prod local governments to step up land buying. "We have to protect what is left," he says. Private groups and wealthy individuals can open their pocketbooks too. Preservation-minded Doug Tompkins, founder of the Esprit clothing company, has bought 640,000 acres (259,000 hectares) of forest land in Chile...