Word: islanded
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...replaced by muddy rice paddies and secondary shrubs. This loss of habitat is the primary driver of extinction on Madagascar. The trees support a web of life, from the hefty indri to dazzlingly tiny frogs that fit on your pinky, but deforestation in Madagascar is so severe that the island's soil, unmoored by the loss of the trees, simply slides into the sea. The crimson trail of erosion has been visible from space...
...forest throbs with invisible life. What we can't see, we can hear: tree frogs mating, insects whirring, a rustling through the branches. Our flashlights pierce the canopy, but just barely, before a thicket of leaves absorbs the beam. After hundreds of years of human exploration on this island, there are still countless species that have yet to be described - and that may be lost to extinction before we ever discover them. Our knowledge of this planet's incalculable richness is barely more complete than a flashlight's illumination of a tropical rainforest - brief and finite - but our capacity...
...Avoiding JordanRe Andrew Butters' postcard from the Jordan River: The river has never been "deep and wide" [Sept. 15]. And the so-called "Island of Peace" was the site of a massacre in 1997 when a Jordanian soldier opened fire and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls on an outing. David Holtzer, Jerusalem...
...pleasure lies in the piquancy of the writer-state pairings. Some are more obvious--heavy hitter Jonathan Franzen handles New York. Some are less so--imagine the editors' relief when they remembered that Jhumpa Lahiri hails from tiny Rhode Island (which, as she points out, is not an island!). There's something about their home state that puts writers in confessional moods. Picture Anthony Bourdain lighting M-80s ("It's a quarter stick a dynamite!!") as a j.d. in Jersey or a teenage Joshua Ferris cruising the canals of Florida with Jimmy Buffett (at the time he didn't know...
Greenland is the front line in humanity's battle against climate change. The warming that is easy to dismiss elsewhere is undeniable on this 860,000-sq.-mi. island of fewer than 60,000 people. More and more of Greenland, whose frozen expanses are a living remnant of the last ice age, disappears each year, with as much as 150 billion metric tons of glacier vanishing annually, according to one estimate. If all the ice on Greenland were to melt tomorrow, global sea levels would rise more than 20 ft.--enough to swamp many coastal cities. Though no one thinks...