Word: humanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...life, goes the saying. Biologists would go further and argue that variety is the very stuff of life. Life needs diversity because of the interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes, other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth's species to survive...
Through most of his 2 million years or so of existence, man has thrived in earth's environment -- perhaps too well. By 1800 there were 1 billion human beings 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...
Most of these evils had been going on for a long time, and some of the worst disasters apparently had nothing to do with human behavior. Yet this year's bout of freakish weather and environmental horror stories seemed to act as a powerful catalyst for worldwide public opinion. Everyone suddenly sensed that this gyrating globe, this precious repository of all the life that we know of, ^ was in danger. No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home. Thus...
Toxic waste and radioactive contamination could lead to shortages of safe drinking water, the sine qua non of human existence. And in a world that could house between 8 billion and 14 billion people by the mid-21st century, there is a strong likelihood of mass starvation. It is even possible to envision the world so wryly and chillingly prophesied by the typewriting cockroach in Donald Marquis' archy and mehitabel: "man is making deserts of the earth/ it wont be long now/ before man will have it used up/ so that nothing but ants/ and centipedes and scorpions/ can find...
...much global warming has occurred, how much more is on the way and what the climatic consequences will be, giving policymakers an excuse for delay. But no one disputes the fact that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen and continues to increase rapidly and that the human race is thus conducting a dangerous experiment on an unprecedented scale. The possible consequences are so scary that it is only prudent for governments to slow the buildup of CO2 through preventive measures, from encouraging energy conservation to developing alternatives to fossil fuels...