Word: forests
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From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit...
...Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands...
...alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels...
...Widmark met his first wife, Jean Hazlewood, when they were students at Lake Forest. They married in 1942 and became one of Hollywood's most quietly renowned couples. Hazlewood wrote the screenplay for Widmark's one film as a director, The Secret Ways in 1961. Their daughter Anne married Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax in 1969. Richard and Anne were married for 55 years until Hazlewood's death, after a long siege of Alzheimer's disease, in 1997. He told New York Times reporter Aljean Harmetz that he had never been unfaithful or even flirted with other women because...
...that, sometimes I wish I could just walk through a garden or a forest and be happy. But no, when I do I want to take a picture, then I want to write a poem. Sometimes I wish I could just relax, and appreciate life without wanting to continually transform all the good that I see into something else. But I think that's why I've always talked about the blessing and curse of being an artist - you have this special gift, but on the other hand you're never satisfied. The only time I have respite is when...