Word: planetful
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Vitousek, 52, didn't plan to spend his life tending to the planet's health; he began as a political science major. While a student at Amherst, however, he wrote a thesis on land use and stumbled across a book on biological invasions of pristine places. A native of Hawaii, he knew that this problem was especially acute in his home state. All of Hawaii's 20 species of flightless birds have vanished, and half the flying ones as well. One-sixth of the native plants are gone, and 30% of remaining ones are threatened. "I decided I wanted...
Vitousek is currently focusing on the problem of global nitrogen, the element that makes up 80% of the atmosphere. Nitrogen is also found in fossil-fuel exhaust and is a principal ingredient in fertilizer. Spread too much of it around, and it can throw off the planet's biological balance, triggering explosive growth in some species and suffocating others. "That's a huge alteration in how the world works," Vitousek says. "Our capacity to change the earth means we must manage this." For a man who didn't even much care for science at first, that's quite a mission...
That revelation marked the beginning of Knoll's lifelong fascination with one of the most mysterious episodes in the history of our planet: the sudden appearance some 540 million years ago of a wild profusion of multicelled animals. That event, known as the Cambrian Explosion, created the evolutionary dynamic that produced most of the species that subsequently populated the earth, from insects and fish to dinosaurs and humans. Given his background, Knoll was particularly interested in how geophysical and geochemical changes (caused by powerful tectonic forces) might have set the stage for everything that followed...
...wider world it has ushered in a mix of the promise (and perils) of a truly global capitalist economy and mounting geopolitical uncertainty. It seemed safe to assume, a decade ago, that the end of a conflict between two powers whose combined nuclear arsenals could destroy the planet 300 times over would leave the world a safer place. Instead, today's world is more dangerous than ever. The very power in those nuclear arsenals - once they confronted the reality of using them during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 - created an overriding incentive to avoid a direct confrontation...
...doesn't matter. I'm still here on the planet. And what I remember most clearly about my week is a murky stretch docked in Intensive Care...