Word: sustaining
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only inhabit but also shape their habitat. In their search for food, they uproot and topple trees, allowing grasses and shrubs to take root and sunlight to reach the ground. By digging with their tusks, the great beasts bring underground pools to the surface, creating water holes that sustain a host of thirsty creatures. Warns a May 1989 study by a consortium of conservationists: "The elephant's extermination will lead to biological impoverishment and domino-like extinctions over much of Africa...
...with arched windows and high ceilings may have to be padlocked. Not so long ago they were all open, and the square filled up on Saturday night, when neighbors came to buy and gossip. Prices were less important then than people. A caring society thrived there and helped to sustain the values that politicians now like to talk about as they see order and meaning melt away in urban complexes...
Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging...
...economists advise some breathtakingly sweeping changes: decontrol prices, end huge state subsidies, expand the private sector, open a capital market with realistic interest rates. Soviet specialists call for something more elusive: effective leadership. Says Oleg Bogomolov, director of Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System: "To sustain perestroika, a new speedup, more radical change, is required." Gorbachev, adds Ambartsumov, "talks too much and doesn't carry through his decisions...
...also pawns in the games played by powerful Middle East states. In Iran, they are part of a domestic power struggle between Rafsanjani and his hard-line Interior Minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, who served as paymaster to Hizballah in the early 1980s. Experts feel that Mohtashami's - ability to sustain the hostage holding will be a litmus test of his power under the newly elected President. Syria, which maintains about 25,000 troops in Lebanon, could improve its relations with the West by rescuing the hostages, but it wields little influence over the Shi'ites who hold them. Still...