Word: mi
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Less than 10% HI SD NE KS MN IA WI MI...
...ecosystem's intricate, interdependent webs of life are hard to restore once they have become frayed. The U.S. is learning this lesson in its multibillion-dollar effort to halt the decline of the Everglades, the "river of grass" that once covered 4,500 sq. mi. (11,700 sq km) in Florida. Having spent much of this century channeling, damming and diverting Everglades water for urban and agricultural use, state and federal politicians have watched with growing alarm as these alterations threw the ecosystem into a tailspin. Wading-bird populations have plummeted; sport and commercial fish catches have fallen...
...just three or four decades, we had managed to reverse one of nature's most remarkable geomorphological phenomena. By the 1980s coastal Louisiana, instead of expanding in size, was disappearing under the Gulf at a rate of nearly 40 sq. mi. (100 sq km) a year. (The rate of land loss has declined somewhat since then; no one seems sure...
...personal hero is Captain Ron Gatto of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection Watershed Police. Since 1905 New York City has employed an environmental police force to protect the 1,969 sq. mi. (5,100 sq km) of watersheds that feed the city's upstate drinking-water reservoirs. DEP, which came into being in 1978, has the authority to enforce laws against polluting the watersheds. But records show that prior to 1989, DEP's police never arrested a single polluter. A succession of New York City governments apparently didn't want to antagonize upstate landowners, who wielded great...
...almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands would have died...