Word: forester
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...should people in developed countries care about the survival of tropical species never seen outside a rain forest? Yes, they should. Variety is the spice of life, goes the saying. Biologists would go further and argue that variety is the very stuff of life. Life needs diversity because of the interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes, other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth...
...today contain ingredients originally derived from wild plants. Hidden anonymously in clumps of vegetation about to be bulldozed or burned might be plants with cures for still unconquered diseases. "I know of three plants with the potential to , treat AIDS," said Janzen. "One grows in an Australian rain forest, one in Panama and one in Costa Rica...
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...