Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Portuguese fishermen or Welsh hill farmers may not endorse that claim as they struggle to wrest a living from sea and soil. Like the U.S., Western Europe has its rust belt and its regions of rural poverty. Nor has Western Europe totally escaped the scourges of drugs and violence. Yet many West Europeans are not only matching Americans in material wealth, but they also believe themselves to be enjoying a better quality of life. "I don't know what America has to offer me that I haven't got already and that I would envy," says British architect Ian Grant...
...water evaporates off the upper leaves, cooling the trees as they collect the intense sunlight. Air currents over the forest gather this evaporation into clouds, which return the moisture to the system in torrential rains. Dead animals and vegetation decompose quickly, and the resulting nutrients move rapidly from the soil back to growing plants. The forest is such an efficient recycler that virtually no decaying matter seeps into the region's rivers...
...when stripped of its trees, the land becomes inhospitable. Most of the Amazon's soil is nutrient poor and ill suited to agriculture. The rain forest has an uncanny capacity to flourish in soils that elsewhere would not even support weeds...
...most of the roughly 8,000 families that heeded the government's call between 1970 and 1974, the dream turned into a bitter disappointment. The soil, unlike the rich sod in the Western U.S., was so poor that crop yields began to deteriorate badly after three or four years. Most settlers eventually gave up and left...
...instance, was supposed to be a model settlement village with gravel roads, schools and health clinics. But when a surge of migrants traveled down BR-364 to Machadinho in 1985, orderly development became a pell- mell land grab. Settlers encountered the familiar scourges of the rain forest: poor soil and inescapable mosquito-borne disease. Decio Fujizaki, a settler who came west four years ago, has just contracted malaria for the umpteenth time. Says he: "I always wanted my own plot of land. If only it wasn't for this wretched disease...