Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...look for springs and didn't bother to dig a well until early in 1609 and instead drank James River water, which was both brackish and polluted. Most important, in the colony's early years, which were especially dry, the Powhatan knew how to live directly off the land and waterways as expert foragers...
...expansion of English settlements produced yet another disadvantage for the Powhatan: more cleared land, which helped the English weaponry come into its own. The introduction of snaphance guns in the 1620s, eliminating the need for keeping separate matches alight, consolidated that advantage. By then, of course, Powhatan men were taking and using any guns they could lay hands on, but it was too late...
...Powhatan gradually became confined to their homeland, their attitude toward land began to work against them. Traditionally farmland was "owned" only while it was being worked. Otherwise, like the forest and waterways, it was "public" land, on which any family could forage. In their world, with its relatively small populations, there was always more land to move to. That ceased to be the case when enough aliens had settled in, aliens who insisted that they owned "their" land forever and that no one could trespass on it. It was not until late in the 17th century, when they had lost...
...Iriba, the logistics base in northeast Chad for six camps of refugees from Darfur. Aid workers there tell me that as horrific as the suffering in Darfur is today, it is almost surely going to get worse. "The water is going. The firewood is gone. The land has lost its ability to regenerate," says Palouma Ponlibae, an agriculture and natural-resources officer for the relief agency CARE. "The refugees are going to have to move. There's going to be nothing here to sustain life...
Darfur, a barren, mountainous land just below the Sahara in western Sudan, is the world's worst man-made disaster. In four years, according to the U.N., fighting has killed more than 200,000 people and made refugees of 2.5 million more. The conflict is typically characterized as genocide, waged by the Arab Janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese government, against Darfur's black Africans. But what is often overlooked is that the roots of the conflict may have more to do with ecology than ethnicity. To live on the poor and arid soil of the Sahel--just south...