Word: polarizer
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...world, far north of the Arctic Circle, snow falls only in the summer. The rest of the year is too cold for precipitation, for vegetation and, one would suppose, for human life. Yet a few hundred nomadic polar Eskimos prowl the icy region, always shadowed by the imminence of death from cold or starvation. They describe themselves simply as Inuit...
...Arctic hardships that included the loss of his toes, Peary became the first man to stand at the North Pole. It is a nearly perfect schoolboy legend of endurance and courage rewarded with honor and wealth. There is even a touch of Melville in Peary's faithful black polar companion, Matthew Henson, who wound up with a $900-a-year job as a messenger at the U.S. Customs House...
...history, the saga of Robert Peary was fissured from the beginning. Peary was never reticent about his hunger for glory. Like Douglas MacArthur, he wrote ringing letters about ambition to his mother. Resting in his igloo after the last polar trip, he contemplated elaborate designs for his mausoleum. But according to Matt Henson's recollections, Peary was sullen and evasive about their exact positions at the top of the world. He asserted his claim to the Pole only after returning to civilization and learning that the world was already crediting the achievement to Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn physician...
...death last year. He was an author of protean energies, focused on but not limited to poetry. He was himself very nearly as renowned as "Alan Severance, the nationally famous drinker," whom LIFE magazine photographs "holding forth to rapt pals in an Irish pub." Severance's polar positions are rebellion and awe. "Both seemed built in, he was ready to defend both to the death. You had to have both. He saw damned little of either in most Americans at the moment: just cop-out or sheephood, not independence or emulation. Hyperdemocracy, the sovereignty of the unqualified individual, added...
...thermal pollution, not crowding, will probably impose the first total limit to economic growth on earth. Many people estimate that the thermal pollution required to bring earth's present population up to America's present standard of living, without depending on nonrenewable resources, will be enough to melt the polar icecaps and drown most of the people and almost all of the farms in the world. (Jay Forrester's group, for example, recommends that underdeveloped countries slow down their growth now, because it will be impossible on earth to close the gap between them and us.) This form of pollution...