Word: manuals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...confusion was so great that the agencies finally got together in 1989 and wrote a manual, spelling out for the first time what a wetland is: any depression where water accumulates for seven consecutive days during the growing season, where certain water-loving plants are found and where the soil is saturated enough with water that anaerobic bacterial activity can take place. Development in such areas was forbidden without a special exemption. And anyone wanting an exemption from the rules had to prove that there was no practical alternative to wetlands destruction...
...Administration has proposed a new manual that relaxes the rules. It designates as wetlands areas having 15 consecutive days of inundation during a growing season or 21 days in which the soil is saturated with water up to the surface. Moreover it redefines the growing season to be shorter and reduces the variety of plants that qualify an area as a wetland. The provision requiring proof of no viable alternative to filling in a wetland will apply only to "highly valuable" areas -- the top rung on a new classification ladder to be worked out over the next year...
Still, the outcome could have been worse. EPA chief William Reilly, who was in charge of rewriting the manual, tried to ease the existing guidelines as little as possible. But he had to win the approval of probusiness presidential advisers. The resulting compromise may not please environmentalists, but it may derail a bill moving through Congress that would have been even more damaging to wetlands...
...manual will not become official until after a 60-day period of public comment and a subsequent EPA review, and environmental groups are gearing up to comment loudly. So are those who want to profit from the wetlands. Says Mark Maslyn of the American Farm Bureau Federation: "The new rules bring some common sense back to wetlands policy." But common sense may not be the best guide in a debate that hinges on scientific questions. As with so many other resources, America's marginal wetlands may not be fully appreciated until they are gone...
...book, Final Exit, is a manual for committing suicide or helping someone else to do so. It includes charts of lethal dosages for 18 prescription drugs, primarily pain killers and sleeping tablets; it debates and debunks the merits of cyanide; it offers abundant practical advice about asphyxiation by plastic bag or auto exhaust. Seemingly every detail is addressed: mixing pills with yogurt or pudding so that the patient does not vomit or pass out before ingesting a lethal amount; not turning off the telephone or message machine, because "any changes will only alert callers to something unusual happening"; having family...