Word: timber
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...Ramas make up at most 4% of Nicaragua's 2.9 million people. Their traditional lands include most of the country's northeast region, which to the Sandinistas has strategic value as a buffer against Honduras. The underpopulated and economically neglected Miskito territory is a trove of timber and gold. Less than a year after they took power, the Sandinistas began to seize control of the area by transferring authority over land ownership to the state. Eventually they launched a direct assault on the Miskitos by proclaiming an agrarian reform law that, according to Miskito leaders, ignored traditional Indian...
...that the Reserve Mining Co. had been polluting Lake Superior. Lord was eventually removed from that case after a higher court accused him of "gross bias" against the company. In another case that had ecologists cheering, the judge refused to permit a trapping season for Minnesota's Eastern timber wolf; the decision caused considerable upset among farmers, who maintained that the wild predators were killing their livestock...
Much East-West trade involves convoluted deals: Western firms sell items like steel or chemicals to Communist state trading organizations in exchange for such items as tobacco, vodka, timber, trolleys and forklift trucks. The Western company then often resells the Eastern product through a middleman for cash. In one of the biggest of these accords, Occidental Petroleum and the Soviet Union have a 20-year, $20 billion agreement that calls, in part, for the annual exchange of 1 million tons of American superphosphoric acid fertilizer for 4 million tons of Soviet ammonia, urea and potash...
...scientists, it may be the start of a trend toward devastation that could eventually engulf the entire Eastern green range. Their worry is not unfounded. An apparently similar malady has ravaged 34% of West Germany's wooded lands, causing an annual $509 million in damages to timber and related industries. So far, the U.S. decline has been measured mostly in aesthetic and recreational losses. But it is beginning to have an economic cost as well. Sugar Maple Harvester David Marvin, for example, has lost all the maple trees on ten acres of his 700-acre Vermont spread. A reduction...
Solutions seem a long way off. Arboreal experts are only now beginning to assess the severity of the problem. The Forest Service, for example, has just started a study of the condition of yellow pine, the South's prime source of commercial timber. At Oak Ridge, botanists are examining samples of soil for traces of metals such as aluminum and zinc. In May, U.S. forest experts will travel to West Germany to compare notes with European scientists; in turn, German researchers will visit the U.S. in June. Says Fred White, staff forester with the North Carolina division of forest...