Word: homo
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...bestriding the planet. That number had doubled by 1930 and doubled again by 1975. If current birthrates hold, the world's present population of 5.1 billion will double again in 40 more years. The frightening irony is that this exponential growth in the human population -- the very sign of homo sapiens' success as an organism -- could doom the earth as a human habitat...
...applied to the rest of the world, two things become clear. One is that virtually every long-term environmental change is occurring in miniature somewhere on the planet, whether it is a regional warming trend in sub-Saharan Africa or the vanishing coastline in Louisiana. The other is that Homo sapiens is an immensely resourceful species, with an impressive ability to accommodate sweeping change. In countries and regions hit by climatic upheavals, people have come up with a variety of solutions that are likely to have broad applicability to the global problems of tomorrow...
...comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh -- at this or at anything he says ("That's a new tape recorder") -- because under the still alive scorn, the still alive paranoia, lives the embodiment of resilience. Homo redivivus. Degraded, insistent, recovering...
...slow process of erosion. The weapons will be abolished as the missions for which they were designed come to seem unnecessary or absurd." And what of tinkering around with life in test tubes? Dyson issues a warning: "Genetic engineering must stop short of monkeying around irresponsibly with the species Homo sapiens." Beyond that restriction, beneficent marvels proliferate: "There are no laws of physics and chemistry which say that potatoes cannot grow on trees or that diamonds cannot grow in a desert...
Chatwin contributes his own controversial assessments. The network of harmonious songlines convinces him that Homo sapiens is not hopelessly belligerent. He reconstructs a conversation he had with Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist and author of the influential On Aggression; he ransacks his notebooks and ponders anthropological and philosophical teachings. His hesitant conclusion is that humans are fundamentally restless and, like the aboriginal, the species needs to wander...