Word: raine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...skies over western Brazil will soon be dark both day and night. Dark from - the smoke of thousands of fires, as farmers and cattle ranchers engage in their annual rite of destruction: clearing land for crops and livestock by burning the rain forests of the Amazon. Unusually heavy rains have slowed down the burning this year, but the dry season could come at any time, and then the fires will reach a peak. Last year the smoke grew so thick that Porto Velho, the capital of the state of Rondonia, was forced to close its airport for days...
After years of inattention, the whole world has awakened at last to how much is at stake in the Amazon. It has become the front line in the battle to rescue earth's endangered environment from humanity's destructive ways. "Save the rain forest," long a rallying cry for conservationists, is now being heard from politicians, pundits and rock stars. The movement has sparked a confrontation between rich industrial nations, which are fresh converts to the environmental cause, and the poorer nations of the Third World, which view outside interference as an assault on their sovereignty...
...matter to all mankind. Government leaders around the world are calling on Brazil to stop the burning. Two delegations from the U.S. Congress, which included Senators Al Gore of Tennessee and John Chafee of Rhode Island, traveled to the Amazon earlier this year to see the plight of the rain forest firsthand. Says Gore: "The devastation is just unbelievable. It's one of the great tragedies of all history...
...jungle is so dense and teeming that all the biologists on earth could not fully describe its life forms. A 1982 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report estimated that a typical 4-sq.-mi. patch of rain forest may contain 750 species of trees, 125 kinds of mammals, 400 types of birds, 100 of reptiles and 60 of amphibians. Each type of tree may support more than 400 insect species. In many cases the plants and animals assume Amazonian proportions: lily pads that are 3 ft. or more across, butterflies with 8-in. wingspans and a fish called the pirarucu...
...diversity of the Amazon is more than just good material for TV specials. The rain forest is a virtually untapped storehouse of evolutionary achievement that will prove increasingly valuable to mankind as it yields its secrets. Agronomists see the forest as a cornucopia of undiscovered food sources, and chemists scour the flora and fauna for compounds with seemingly magical properties. For instance, the piquia tree produces a compound that appears to be toxic to leaf-cutter ants, which cause millions of dollars of damage each year to South American agriculture. Such chemicals promise attractive alternatives to dangerous synthetic pesticides. Other...