Word: growth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hope may, at last, be where the head is. Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved a prescription medicine that increases hair growth in some men whose hair is thinning on top but not completely gone. Marketed by the Upjohn Co. under the trade name Rogaine, it is the first product ever cleared by federal regulators for treating hair loss. Its key ingredient: minoxidil, a highly touted drug that, in tablet form, had already been approved to treat high blood pressure. Only by accident did researchers discover that minoxidil could also regrow hair. Anticipating a vast new market...
...Peter Morrison, working with the help of the Wilderness Society, have just nailed down what is either a very large bureaucratic fraud or a conveniently jumbled process of long-term fudging. Environmentalists had suspected for a long time that the Forest Service had vastly overestimated the amount of old growth -- virgin forest -- still left in the Northwest. Traditionally, the Forest Service has disapproved of messy, tangled old-growth forests, whose dank, rotting understory and ancient trees it has referred to as "overmature" and "decadent." It has preferred to clear-cut the old growth, and then treat trees as if they...
Overestimating the amount of old growth still standing, by underreporting clear-cuts or by counting mature second growth as primal forest, is convenient because it reduces the urgency of squawks from environmentalists. But Stewartt and Morrison (a Forest Service employee moonlighting on his days off) drew circles in red pencil around old-growth areas on the Forest Service's own aerial maps. Then they flew off to find the trees...
Most of them, it turned out, had already been sold, clear-cut and trucked off. In six national forests in Oregon and Washington, they found that only about 33% to 50% of the sample tracts listed as old growth were still forested. "Several years of clear-cutting simply are not accounted for," says Morrison. In the Olympic National Forest below us, only 106,000 acres remain of the 217,000 claimed by the Forest Service. In Oregon's Siskiyou, 142,000 acres remain of a claimed 433,000. Much of what was still uncut was broken into tracts too small...
...habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely to be successful, and it now seems possible that sustained-yield forests based on clear-cutting simply may not work...