Word: fossils
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reason for the popularity of Segal's work is its material: plaster casts from live bodies. Because there was once a person inside each of the shells, they have the slightly eerie factuality of a petrified tree, a fossil or (as has often been said) that great tourist attraction of Southern Italy, the plaster molds of dead Pompeians. Now and again, Segal made an identifiable portrait; the show includes the effigies of those New York Pompeians of the '60s, the collectors Robert and Ethel Scull, she complete with sunglasses and Courrèges boots. But as a rule...
...Energy's extremely broad definition of solar to include not only power from the sun's rays but also hydropower and energy derived from the burning of "biomass," which includes wood, plants and other organic matter. The chapter's supposition is that rising costs of fossil fuels will make the installation price of solar heating an extremely attractive investment to homeowners, yielding as much as 17% annually. Although the Harvard researchers propose more than $1 billion in Government subsidies for research into high-technology solar devices, such as sun-deflecting satellites and photovoltaic cells, they assert that...
...other extreme, the Harvard study is gloomy to the point of being defeatist about fossil fuels. Energy Future offers no hope that much new oil can be found in drilled-out America. The authors largely write off as impractical the attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production...
...will be hard, perhaps impossible, for Switzerland to break from its nuclear umbilical cord. Lacking fossil fuels, it relies more per capita on nuclear power for its electrical energy than any other country in the world. Three nuclear plants produce 12% of Switzerland's electricity needs. A fourth plant was supposed to have started up by now, but it has been delayed indefinitely by Harrisburg. Admits Willi Ritschard, Switzerland's energy minister: "We Cannot survive without nuclear energy...
Since the early '70s, Americans have been flirting reluctantly with a complicated and grudging awareness about themselves and their orgies of fossil burning. But they are still in the quibbling stage, in what psychologists call a period of "defensive avoidance." The gas lines that started in California and have begun to spread across the country like a rumor are still open to confusing interpretations: Are they a temporary inconvenience or ominous intimations of the future? The last gas crisis, in 1973-74, subsided soon enough. Perhaps this one will as well? According to the Gallup poll, more than three...