Word: lumber
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...Ludwig paid $3 million to a group of Brazilian families for approximately 6,000 sq. mi. of dense rain forest in the country's remote Amazon region. He then set in motion a bold plan for developing the area to help meet anticipated world shortages of food, lumber and wood pulp for papermaking...
Ludwig threw money and manpower at problems thrown up by the jungle. But in many cases he made costly mistakes. In attempting to start his lumber and paper business, for example, he had to clear the land to plant new trees. Several Caterpillar "jungle crushers," giant bulldozers costing $250,000 each, were brought in to do the job, but the machines proved inappropriate because they damaged the unexpectedly delicate Amazon topsoil...
Laskey Bell was studious, quiet; his father jeeringly called him a "clerk," and that's what he became--a clerk in the Osborne Lumber Company, jeered at there by his boss Eddie Osborne because he blushed at the racy calendars Osborne hung on the walls of the office they both shared. Thirty years later, when Osborne came to him for a loan that would enable him to move into the expanding natural gas industry of the Kanawha Valley with the promise of a full partnership, Laskey Bell set a further condition--he wanted Osborne's daughter's hand in marriage...
DETROIT AT MIDDAY is strikingly quiet. It is a city of 1.5 million people--but it seems devoid of the characteristic noise and bustle. There is relatively little automobile traffic. City buses lumber about, half-empty. Almost no one shops in the re-developed shopping plazas. And there are no guests in the castle-like Renaissance Center hotel complex, which stands over the Motor City like a gleaming caricature of "urban revitalization." Detroit is not thriving: it resembles nothing so much as an empty shell. And it is empty, too, of hope for the unemployed who line the streets, selling...
Industries that provide materials to the automakers and homebuilders are also in serious trouble. Steel companies have idled about 50,000 employees, and the rubber industry has laid off some 10,000. The timber business has toppled. In Oregon alone, 22,000 lumber workers have lost their jobs. Governor Victor Atiyeh has declared the industry to be in a "state of emergency" in an effort to qualify local businessmen for federal relief loans...