Word: thinning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sometimes it doesn't pay to be too popular. By the time of his death in 1985, at age 97, Marc Chagall was suburbia's favorite genius. He offered modernism without tears, without the headaches of Cubism or the thin air of abstraction. For middle-class Jews, he was also the chronicler of the world of their fathers, the poet of that lost, enchanted universe. By the mid-1960s, when Fiddler on the Roof took its title from one of Chagall's best-known motifs, his popular reputation was at its peak. But in the eyes of an art world...
This new wave of no-guilt snacks has direct links to the efforts of Dr. Robert Atkins, whose get-thin-quick regimen became famous in the '70s for letting dieters have their steak and eat it too. Atkins controverted conventional dietary wisdom by asserting that eating fatty foods like bacon wasn't what caused weight gain. The real culprit, he said, was carbohydrates--the sugar and starch that are especially abundant in junk food. An estimated 25 million dieters have tried to follow his edict that if deprived of carbs as a source of energy, the body will burn...
...many forest ecologists, manipulating fuel loads--whether by thinning, prescribed burning or a combination of the two--constitutes the best strategy we have for ensuring that the ponderosa pine forests of the present survive into the future. And the good news, says Mark Finney, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., is that it's probably not going to be necessary to thin or prescribe-burn every acre of forest at risk. According to mathematical models that Finney has developed, reducing fuels in a strategic pattern across a more manageable...
...forests are good candidates for thinning. Among the prime examples are the lodgepole pine forests that occupy higher elevations across the mountain West. Lodgepole pines, which are thin-barked, flourish only in areas where sufficient moisture and cool temperatures keep fires at bay for long periods of time. There they grow quite densely together--so densely, in fact, that numerous trees are shaded out by more vigorous competitors. These dead and dying trees, intermingled with low-limbed spruce and fir, add a vertical dimension to the fuels structure that one day will carry fire into the canopy--as happened across...
...attempting to thin lodgepole pine forests to prevent such blowups would be ludicrous, say scientists, for these seemingly catastrophic blazes serve important ecological functions. Among other things, lodgepole pine saplings do not flourish beneath the shade of mature trees and thus are dependent on fires to clear sun-filled openings. Moreover, many lodgepole pines package their seeds in resin-sealed cones that can be opened only by intense heat. "What you have to keep asking yourself is what range of fire frequency and severity a particular forest has experienced," says Tania Schoennagel, a University of Colorado researcher who studies postfire...