Word: islanded
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...extinction is habitat loss and degradation, which affects 40% of the world's mammals. That can be seen clearly in the deforestation afflicting much of the tropical world, including Madagascar, where 90% of the country's original forest cover has been lost. Vast stretches of the once verdant island, where I traveled with Mittermeier last month, are eroded wastelands, capable of supporting few animals or people. Though the rate of deforestation has been reduced sharply in recent years, thanks in part to a greener government, Madagascar's protected areas are still threatened by new mining projects and simple human population...
...been three weeks since Hurricane Ike blew ashore on Galveston Island bringing up to 20 feet of Gulf waters over the low-lying land, killing a still yet to be determined number of residents - several hundred remain missing - and inflicting billions of dollars in damage. The television satellite trucks and cable news stars are gone and the nation's collective eye has turned elsewhere. But thousands of area residents now live in a stench-filled world where the incongruous is normal and the dangerous real...
...slow descent into the Looking Glass land that hurricanes create begins just south of Houston along Interstate Highway 45, the road to Galveston Island. The first odd note is the number of blown out billboards and signs. The gold has gone from the Golden Arches, the toll-free phone number on the billboard for the class action law firm has been torn and tossed to the wind. Then the blue tarps begin to appear, stretched taut over the rooftops of strip malls and apartment buildings...
...amid a stinking pile of family belongings. The box contains the flag that had draped her husband's casket six years ago. It is an ironic coincidence, a reporter's happenstance, brought about by a random turn down a neighborhood street that looks like so many others on the island - lifeless homes with leafless, saltwater-poisoned trees, battered fences hung with soggy towels, shattered windows, and front yards filled with piles of wet carpet, soaked clothes, moldy pots and pans, beach chairs and books, all water-laden, useless, even dangerous from soaking in the diseased stew, and hung about with...
Francis fled the island and the home where she had lived for "40 odd years" with her husband, a sea captain for Texaco, taking only a few photographs and the bank books for the Galveston Grandmothers Club. It was the first time she had left during a storm. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia, a category three storm, had blown hard but with no surge. This time, Hollywood Heights, her West End island neighborhood just two blocks off the beach was quickly put under water by Ike. A moldy black water line high on the yellow siding shows where the water...