Word: habitat
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Noah's directive was to preserve all species. Modern man has no such option. Some species are already doomed, the incidental victims of logging, mining, dams and the fragmentation of their habitats. Almost daily we face another agonizing conflict between ecology and economics. In the Pacific Northwest loggers' jobs are pitted against the need to save ancient forests, the habitat of spotted owls. In the Southwest a $582 million water project is delayed because it threatens the squawfish. In Arizona a $200 million observatory was held up on behalf of some 150 rare Mount Graham red squirrels. Are all these...
...biodiversity. The answer is not to dilute the Endangered Species Act but to better anticipate the consequences of human activity, focusing on entire ecosystems rather than on single species. By the time a creature joins the endangered list it may be too late, the genetic stock impoverished, its habitat destroyed...
...species are vanishing on a grand scale. There are 1,116 imperiled species on the list, an additional 3,600 candidate species behind them. Some will die out waiting to be listed. These numbers are only a pale reflection of a wider problem. In tropical rain forests, loss of habitat is pushing at least 20,000 species a year into extinction, according to Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson. If the U.S. is to influence policy overseas, it will be by dint of example, not rhetoric. Wealthy nations must check their own appetites before asking far greater sacrifices of poorer nations...
...also dismayed that Harvard would use its influence with the U.S. Forest Service to allow development in a unique habitat rather than use its influence to help the Forest Service reform its loophole-infested charter...
...evolutionary terms, these isolated pieces of habitat are true islandspatches of more northern microclimate surrounded by southern desert," writes Gould. "Consider the role that islands (like the Galapagos) have played both in developing the concepts of evolutionary theory and in acting as cradles of origin...