Word: rains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...locals are hearing a lot about protecting the wildlife and the forests these days. For years the 2.5 million acres of rain forest and the wildlife that lives in it--including tigers, leopards, barking deer and gibbons--were left alone while Cambodia was at war. The Cardamoms were used as a sanctuary by the feared Khmer Rouge, who laid land mines and booby traps to keep people out. But when the civil war ended in the 1990s, loggers, hunters and farmers started moving in, slashing and burning the forest and eventually prompting environmental groups to scramble for a strategy...
Wilderness, in the elegant words of the 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act, is land "where man himself is a visitor and does not remain." Wilderness areas are critical for protecting biodiversity: tropical rain forests alone, which cover 6% of the planet's land area, are home to more than half of all known species. But many wild regions suffer from human encroachment, and species are vanishing at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, along with Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, who set up the Whole Earth Catalog, among others...
...lost--at least not yet. Even as Wilson and others warn of an impending Armageddon, conservation groups and scientists are devising innovative strategies for preserving broad swaths of rain forest, grassland, tundra and coral reef before they are swallowed by the global village. All face the fundamental dilemma: how to balance man's economic urgency with nature's ecological vulnerability...
...June the U.S., working with three environmental groups, canceled $5.5 million of Peru's foreign debt. In exchange, Peru will extend protection to 27.5 million acres of tropical rain forest containing pink river dolphins, jaguars, scarlet macaws and giant water lilies. Nongovernment groups will monitor the protected areas to make sure the regulations are enforced. "It's a public-private partnership in the best sense of the word," says Stuart Irvin, an attorney with Covington & Burling in Washington who gave pro bono legal advice on this deal and similar swaps. "Everyone comes out a winner...
...Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable with trees on it than logged...