Word: rifkin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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VERMIN. THE WORD reminds most people of cockroaches scuttling across kitchen floors and rats skulking in dark basement corners. But to Jeremy Rifkin, the environmental movement's most prominent polemicist, vermin are big, brown-eyed ungulates that graze the rolling countryside, chew their cud and moo. In his controversial new book, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, Rifkin manages to blame the world's burgeoning population of bovines for a staggering spectrum of ecological ills. In the U.S., he charges, runoff from mammoth feedlots is despoiling streams and underground aquifers. In sub- Saharan Africa, cattle...
...father in the interest of fiscal stability are stand-ins for the whole indulged baby-boom generation. The burnt-out father, who obsesses about the past and about a supposed universal abandonment of standards, epitomizes a dying elitist culture. But while the children emerge with convincing particularity, all Ron Rifkin's fiery righteousness and icy brilliance cannot make plausible the contrived second act, which centers on the father's buying and burning an original painting by Hitler...
...Although gadfly activist Jeremy Rifkin failed in a legal attempt to delay the first human-gene-therapy experiment last year, he skillfully used the courts to set back by months, and even years, other scientific trials involving genetically engineered organisms or substances. His success in obstructing genetic experiments came despite the fact that in every case, his warnings of dire consequences proved to be unfounded. Favorable coverage of his views in some newspapers and on TV heightened public misgivings about genetic research...
Levels of corporate debt tend to ebb and flow in a cyclical pattern. For the + moment, leverage is out of style. "Companies may have learned a valuable lesson," says William Rifkin, a managing director at Salomon Brothers, "but they're doomed to repeat the same mistakes in another 20 years." Maybe so, but that means the business managers who have survived the debt swamp will be unwilling to return to it until well into the next century...
Johnson's appeal is expected to be heard no later than April. There is a good chance that Judge Parslow's decision will not stand. "After all, the state law in California says that the birth mother is the mother," points out Jeremy Rifkin, ecological gadfly and co-chairman of the National Coalition Against Surrogacy, a group that has successfully lobbied in most of the 13 states that have laws banning commercial surrogacy...