Word: planetful
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However frenetically we get and spend, an attachment to the natural life of the planet remains fixed in our system. Environmentalists sometimes complain that the memory of this attachment is buried too deep, though it continually surfaces, not only in names of places but also in turns of language that have no meaning in modern experience but are kept alive, nonetheless, like verbal souvenirs--horsepower, stream of consciousness, it's a jungle out there. One cannot think of a single composer, painter or writer who has not tracked at least one major inspiration to a bird, a tree, a rose...
They tried to do it again in Washington. Their target: a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two great institutions of global finance and, say critics, corporate dominion over the planet's poor and disfranchised. When the organizations met a year ago, about two dozen protesters showed up--barely enough to block a single limo. But mindful of Seattle's violence, D.C. cops last week shut down the demonstrators' "convergence" point (a warehouse) and came out in force. This time, they faced not dozens but thousands of demonstrators on the barricades, all joined by a feeling...
Poverty at this University might not be so shameful if it were not so needless. We attend the richest university on the planet. Harvard fund managers take home up to $10 million a year--that's 800 times as much as our subcontracted dining hall worker makes working two full-time jobs. Harvard's annual budget exceeds that of the United Nations by about half a billion dollars...
...pages of the world's newspapers, the emergency-relief money stops flowing--precisely when the country needs ever larger foreign contributions to restart a moribund society. Particularly hard hit has been Rwanda's medical establishment, which is grappling with some of the most pressing public-health issues on the planet. At least 11% of the population is HIV positive. Malaria, cholera and other diseases are rampant and periodically spike to epidemic levels. Malnutrition is a chronic problem here as in much of Africa, with 10% of the children afflicted. And infant mortality rates at 125 deaths per 1,000 births...
...planet, Letteri has an eye towards turning pro in the next few months...