Word: planetful
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Around the globe, on land and in the sea, the story is much the same. Spurred by poverty, population growth, ill-advised policies and simple greed, humanity is at war with the plants and animals that share its planet. Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, predicts that during the next three decades man will drive an average of 100 species to extinction every day. Extinction is part of evolution, but the present rate is at least 1,000 times the pace that has prevailed since prehistory...
...world are threatened by pollution, overfishing and coastal development. It is in the tropics, though, that the battle to preserve what scientists call biodiversity will be won or lost. Tropical forests cover only 7% of the earth's surface, but they house between 50% and 80% of the planet's species...
...argue that variety is the very stuff of life. Life needs diversity because of the interdependencies that link flora and fauna, and because variation within species allows them to adapt to environmental challenges. But even as the world's human population explodes, other life is ebbing from the planet. Humanity is making a risky wager -- that it does not need the great variety of earth's species to survive...
...doin'? Raisa Gorbachev may be one of the few people left on the planet who think Mayor Ed Koch is doing fine -- probably because she doesn't speak English. Koch once called her government the pits and more recently wondered why, if the Soviet President is such a nice guy, he needs 6,000 cops to guard him. After the U.N. reception, Koch recounted Raisa's observation to him that he was so different from those lazy mayors back home who "always complain when they're given extra work...
...anyone else, except possibly Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the U.S. New Age inquisitors remain one of the few puzzles Asimov is unable to crack: "I have never found a way to convince them. They tell me there is 'absolute proof' of aliens landing on this planet. They read it with their own eyes. It turns out they read it at the supermarket checkout counter, trying to escape from reality...