Word: pests
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Unknown in North America until 1988, the zebra mussel has become a pest whose exploding population has prompted alarming predictions of millions of dollars' worth of damage to water-supply systems and the ruination of the sport-fishing industry. A year ago, the city of Monroe, Mich., lost its water supply for two full days because intake lines were plugged with zebra mussels. Earlier, Ford Motor's casting plant in Windsor, Ont., found the creatures choking off the flow of cooling water to its furnaces. Boaters, meanwhile, have watched their hulls and engines become encrusted with mussels...
...this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved nearly 100 test plantings of crops that have been genetically altered to give them traits such as pest resistance and tolerance to weed killers. More ambitious projects are envisioned, among them adding protein to staples like corn and changing the type of oil produced by soybeans. Pigs that grow faster and leaner and cows that manufacture medicine in their milk are other goals. Observes Arnold Foudin, a biotechnology specialist at the USDA: "Ideas that a short while ago might have been dismissed as harebrained Buck Rogers are now being taken quite...
...Central Park every bird mentioned by the bard -- more than 50 species in all -- that was not already native to the region. Instead of filling the city's air with the song of larks and nightingales, the experiment introduced to America the common European starling, a dirty, prolific pest that soon ousted New York's native bluebirds from their nesting places. If there is a moral here, Hitchens refrains from drawing...
...term was synonymous with the dreaded O word -- a farm-belt euphemism for trendy organic farming that uses no synthetic chemicals. But sustainable agriculture has blossomed into an effort to curb erosion by modifying plowing techniques and to protect water supplies by minimizing, if not eliminating, artificial fertilizers and pest controls. "Sustainable agriculture used to be something you said under your breath," jokes Indiana farmer Jim Moseley, agricultural consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Now the definition has broadened so that it's politically acceptable to a greater range of people, and that has opened up an opportunity...
...centuries, magnificent elm trees graced the streets of American towns and cities, providing shade for all and inspiration for such writers as Eugene O'Neill (Desire Under the Elms). But since the 1930s, Dutch elm disease, spread by a pest called the elm bark beetle, has wiped out more than 100 million of the leafy giants. Now elms may be poised for a welcome return...