Word: overflowing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...motion as they bathe. When they heave themselves up riverbanks to dry land, they also go single file and act like bulldozers, making natural irrigation channels. Without the animals, the rivers quickly silted up; without the overflow channels, periodic floods swept like scythes over adjacent lands. The altered conditions favored a proliferation of schistosomiasis-carrying water snails. Such harsh intrusions on wildlife constitute only one way in which man abuses nature. Another is through his sheer numbers. From an estimated 5,000,000 people 8,000 years ago, the world population rose to 1 billion by 1850, 2 billion about...