Word: planting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Today, those highways are in pretty bad shape. More than 90% of China's 160 million acres (400 million hectares) of grasslands are classified as "degraded," slowly losing the diverse collection of native plants that normally flourish there and fueling the massive dust storms that blow across China every spring. Nomadic herders have raised camels, goats, cows, and sheep on these grasslands for hundreds of years, but in the middle of the 20th century, China's population boom and demand for more meat sent livestock numbers soaring. By 1990, some regions were literally grazed bare, herders whose animals were dying...
...less severe in the last few years. Though some scientists chalk uo the latter to fluctuations in weather, others say it's a sign that the grasslands are starting to return to health. "Maybe some places are getting better, but some places are getting worse," says Jiang Gaoming, a plant ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences...
...health care did not appear to be the immediate cause of the snag in negotiations. The strike was prompted by GM's prospective production plans, particularly the construction of a new assembly plant in Mexico that could be ready to export vehicles to the U.S. in about one year. Surprised union members cited job security as the key issue as they walked out of GM assembly plants around Detroit. "They just told us we were going on strike and it was about job security," said one member of UAW Local 594 in Pontiac, Mich. only moments after the strike began...
...encountered very different realities in the Arctic--and different reactions from locals. In Hammerfest, where reindeer graze in the glow of a gas flare, Purvis found Norwegians delighted by the rewards from a natural-gas extraction plant. In Resolute, the native Inuit are not so sanguine about the benefits of balmy weather. One man invited Graff to watch a videotape of his 16-year-old daughter killing her first polar bear, a rite of passage that is under threat as the melting ice reduces the bear population. For the Inuit, says Graff, "the idea that a warmer Arctic would...
...Unfortunately, Lebanon's recent troubles cloud the outlook for the wine industry. This year, impoverished Bekaa farmers took advantage of the security forces' being distracted by the protracted battle against Islamist radicals holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp, to plant another of the Bekaa's fabled crops: hashish. Hashish farming threatens to gobble up land that could be used for vineyards, and creates a get-rich-quick gangster culture that's at odds with the patient investment necessary to produce wine...