Word: plants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even the mass extinctions 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and countless other species did not significantly affect flowering plants, according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. But these plant species are disappearing now, and people, not comets or volcanoes, are the angels of destruction. Moreover, the earth is suffering the decline of entire ecosystems -- the nurseries of new life-forms. For that reason, Wilson deems this crisis the "death of birth." British ecologist Norman Myers has called it the "greatest single setback to life's abundance and diversity since the first flickerings of life almost 4 billion...
...Toyota, points out GM in quick rebuttal, is not as comfortable as it says it is with the U.A.W., because when Toyota opened its own U.S. plant late last year, it avoided the union by choosing a site in Kentucky. Says Furuta, who works in Kentucky: "We need a free hand to choose people. Fifteen percent of our team members here have college degrees. That was true of only 1% in California...
...least the past decade, the nuclear industry, both electric-power and weapons divisions, has faced the prospect of strangling on its radioactive garbage. Now that may actually happen to the Government's nuclear-bomb plant at Rocky Flats, near Boulder. Between next March and May, it will reach a limit set by state law on how much waste it can store on site. At that point, Governor Roy Romer could order it shut, making Rocky Flats the first atomic facility to be closed because it is unable to dispose of its trash...
Oddly enough, a facility exists for permanent burial of the waste. In fact, the Government's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a gigantic hole in a salt bed 2,150 ft. beneath southeastern New Mexico, was supposed to start receiving waste (primarily clothing and tools contaminated by radiation) from Rocky Flats and nine other atomic plants around the country this month. In theory, the salt will creep back around the waste, sealing it harmlessly into the earth. But safety concerns and legal problems have put off the opening date to -- well, when? August at the earliest, says the Department of Energy...
...late, anyway, to head off a game of NIMBY (not in my backyard) between Romer and Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus. Though Government inspectors closed much of the Rocky Flats plant in October because of severe safety violations, enough of it remains running to produce nearly a boxcar load of hazardous waste a week. Until mid-October those boxcars were sent to the National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho for "temporary" storage. But when it became clear that WIPP would not open on schedule, Governor Andrus sent one of the boxcars back to Colorado. There, outside the plant, it still sits, near...