Word: timbers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many species and environments threatened? The main reason is that throughout the tropics, developing nations are struggling to feed their peoples and raise cash to make payments on international debts. Many countries are chopping down their forests for the sake of timber exports. In Central America forests are giving way to cattle ranches, which supply beef to American fast-food chains. The pressures on forests have led Janzen, who has spent 26 years struggling to save Costa Rica's woodlands, to conclude that "everything outside parks will be gone, and everything inside the parks is threatened...
...four-hectare cacao farm a decade ago, the landowner could have done what other besieged farmers have | done. He might easily have picked up an ax and begun cutting down more tropical rain forest around his land on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. He could have sold the timber from the tall laurel trees that shade the cacao bushes, then burned the dense virgin forest on the hill behind his farm. Then Bryant, like so many financially strapped small farmers in Latin America, could have sown pasture and sold the land to a cattle rancher. Within three or four years...
Nowhere are the consequences of unchecked industrialization more obvious than in Siberia's Lake Baikal basin. Nearly 30 years ago, Minlesbumprom (the Ministry of Timber, Pulp and Paper, and Wood Processing Industry) erected the Baikalsh pulp factory on the shores of this majestic body of crystal-clear water. The crescent-shaped lake holds 80% of the country's fresh water and 20% of the world's supply. Three-fourths of the lake's 2,500 fish and plant species, including the Baikal nerpa, a fresh-water seal, are unknown anywhere else in the world...
...combat what they fear will be a rash of Yuletide thefts, Penn State officials have established a rigorous schedule of fines. "The amount of the fine will be based on the type of tree that is stolen," McNichol said. Fines for stealing are $3 per foot for timber trees, $10 for tree farm and nursery trees, and $36 for the prime landscape and "research" trees...
Park officials maintain that they can only contain the fires, not extinguish them. Meanwhile, defenders of the natural-burn policy trumpet its benefits: the flames clear thick stands of timber and prepare the soil for a new generation of flora. For example, many of the seed cones of the lodgepole pine, which covers 60% of the park, only open after being exposed to intense heat. Ecologists expect the fires to help restore the park's depleted stands of aspen trees and increase the wide array of insects, birds and mammals that have found Yellowstone's aging forests increasingly inhospitable...