Word: himalayan
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...drive to put a U.S. woman on Everest had been something between grail and financing gimmick for at least a decade. Everything -- gender, nationalism, internationalism, ever more dangerous routes, climbing solo and without oxygen, and climbing quickly with little equipment, "Alpine style" -- is a gimmick to Himalayan climbers, whose hobby is absurdly expensive. The most strenuous effort is not on the wind-racked ridges above Camp 4; it is in corporate conference rooms, where idlers with powerful legs try to persuade achievers in powerful suits to pay for their vacations...
...what she somewhat dismissively refers to as "the American-woman-on-Eve rest thing." (Tired of hype and of fund raising, she had put $9,000 of her own money into the expedition pot.) No doubt she also quelled some of the grousing from the Old Guard of male Himalayan climbers that women aren't equipped for extreme-high-altitude climbing, complaints that have subsided for the most part into gossip about the undeniable problems that love affairs cause on expeditions. (Allison herself does some grousing on this subject, and she says that one of the reasons her 1988 expedition...
Biologists have identified numerous "hot spots" where ecosystems are under attack and large numbers of unique species face an immediate threat of elimination. Among the troubled areas: Madagascar, where more than 90% of the original vegetation has disappeared; the monsoon forests of the Himalayan foothills that are being denuded by villagers in search of firewood, building materials and arable land; New Caledonia, 83% of whose plants occur nowhere else; the eastern slope of the Andes, as well as forests in East Africa, peninsular Malaysia, northeast Australia and along the Atlantic coast of Brazil...
...Ganges Delta -- where millions of people have set up camp. But the government has drawn up plans for a network of raised helipads and local flood shelters to facilitate the distribution of emergency aid if, as seems inevitable, disaster strikes again. Meanwhile, the country can only appeal to its Himalayan neighbors to do something about the root cause of the flooding: the deforestation of watersheds in India and Nepal that has turned seasonal monsoons into "unnatural disasters...
India has averted the problem by building dikes to contain the monsoon- swollen rivers, but that has merely pushed the flood problem downstream. B.M. Abbas, a former minister of flood control in the Dhaka government who favors the construction of a vast system of Himalayan dams as a long-term solution, charges that "Bangladesh is being destroyed by its neighbors...