Word: growing
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...American Midwest is essentially the granary of the world, supplying corn, wheat and other crops to markets from Chile to China. But all that food doesn't grow by itself. In 2006 U.S. farmers used more than 21 million tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and other fertilizers to boost their crops, and all those chemicals have consequences far beyond the immediate area. When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land...
Since 1990 the dead zone, which begins in summer and lasts until early fall, has averaged about 6,046 sq. mi. But the threat is growing. A study released last week by scientists from Louisiana State University (LSU) and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium estimated that this year's dead zone would be more than 10,000 sq. mi., roughly the size of Massachusetts. But that prediction was made before massive floods hit the Midwest: with the flow of the Mississippi at dangerous levels, and with rains sweeping fertilizer off drowned farms, the dead zone could grow even bigger...
Unfortunately, the dead zone isn't simply an environmental failure, but also a consequence of our national agricultural policy, which subsidizes farmers to grow vast, heavily fertilized quantities of corn and other grains. The pork-laden farm bill, which recently passed Congress over President George W. Bush's veto, will only worsen the problem. And even if we can begin to reduce the future flow of fertilizer, repeated dead zones are having a cumulative effect, with smaller amounts of nitrates and other chemicals in the Gulf having a larger hypoxic impact than in the past. "We have to decide...
...thrilling jolt of humanity. We were friends for 30 years. We closed a few bars together in the early years, before Maureen shaped him up; we talked politics incessantly; we shared summer rentals; we watched our kids, especially Luke and Sophie, who were born a few months apart, grow up, go to Jesuit colleges (Tim got a kick out of the fact that Sophie, a Jewsuit, aced New Testament at Fordham) and, a final happiness for Tim, we saw them graduate...
These companies do not necessarily aim to grow to the size of Toyota or GM. Says Bill Green, a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm that has invested in Tesla Motors: "No one argues today that the Tesla will serve anything but a small subset of the market. But it has changed the conversation. The big car companies will look at Tesla and say, 'Hey, maybe I can use that technology in my cars...