Word: locusts
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West saw the economic collapse in -1929 as the outward sign of a long overdue spiritual decay, conceiving his characters not as microcosms of material injustices, but human beings cut adrift in an empty world. The bleakness of Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of the Locust reflect West's own isolation. He was always very shy, had few friends and never attended school regularly. After graduating from college he left immediately for Paris and from a dark corner in Sylvia Beach's bookshop watched Joyce and Hemingway browse through the stacks...
...symbol for a national apocalypse to come. Now Charles Manson has given this symbol a new dimension. Unless we pursue the drug murders committed in our name with the same fervor we pursue the political murders being committed in the name of our parents, the Day of the Locust may turn out to be a plague on both our houses...
Satellites and Field Scouts. Nine years ago, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations launched a program to check locust "plagues." Weather satellites and air spotters began to track locust concentrations and swarms. A system of field scouts was set up in 42 countries to report locust whereabouts. The Anti-Locust Research Center, established in London in 1921, coordinates this information and forecasts locusts' flight direction. Local governments dispatch spray planes to meet the hordes or treat breeding areas...
...common effort, even Israel and the Arab countries have cooperated, and still do. Last week, for the first summer in 40 years, London's "situation summary" did not list a single menacing locust swarm. The FAO was pleased but not triumphant. Quite likely, as the FAO was the first to point out, an atypical lack of rainfall had inhibited breeding, since the locust's eggs must absorb their weight in water to hatch. Thus the FAO cautioned against concluding that the locust had simply dropped out of the picture. "He is still a global menace in a trough...
Making Contact. Even so, the FAO feels that its program is succeeding. In 1958, locusts devoured 167,000 tons of crops in Ethiopia, starving thousands. Last summer the anti-locust London Center got reports of gathering clouds of locusts that posed an even greater threat. From weather satellite pictures of cloud formations, trackers could map wind patterns. Since locusts ride the winds, spray planes knew where to go. Once they had made contact, they dumped their loads of spray through atomizers, one right after the other, until the swarms were stopped. On the ground, pesticide squads struck breeding areas...