Word: sustaining
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there really must be in the human brain. Pediatricians know that damage to the infant brain doesn't have the same outcome as damage to the adult brain. If a newborn has a stroke, even in the cortex [an area important to higher intellectual functions], he or she may sustain it and develop quite normally. The exact same injury would put an adult in a wheelchair. I wondered if the source of the brain's apparent plasticity was at the level of the single cell...
...changed the natural balances irrevocably. The shift enabled us to produce food surpluses, but the surpluses also allowed us to reproduce prodigiously. When we did, it became only a matter of time before we could no longer have the large area of wildland, per individual, that is necessary to sustain a top-predator species...
...food, shelter, clothing and fuel. We rely on natural products to replenish genetic diversity in our crops and to produce new medicines. We rely on pristine ecosystems to replenish oxygen, regulate water cycles, control erosion, cycle essential nutrients and restock critical fisheries. We still need these things to sustain life--our life. The irony is that our rampant success in living outside the world's ecosystems has put them all, and thus ourselves, in jeopardy...
...seas make up 95% of the planet's biosphere--the realm where all living things exist--and we are stripping and poisoning it, depriving it of its ability to sustain life. Jacques-Yves Cousteau once predicted that unless we--not the editorial or royal we but the universal we--changed our ways and stopped treating the oceans as an infinite resource and a bottomless dump, there would someday come a moment of no recovery. Overwhelmed at last, the resilient seas would no longer be able to cleanse or restock themselves. From that moment on, the oceans--and with them nearly...
...culture: 0) the hype-buster targets her next victim. Just as our ears begin to readjust to the relatively soft hum of Harvard Square, we open the door to Pacific Sunwear, where the music is not quite as loud as its prep school-as-lifestyle neighbor-but could still sustain a pretty hopping nightclub...