Word: topsoil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Little progress has been made on cleaning up the surrounding region. There is no equipment to decontaminate topsoil, and contaminated groundwater is backing up behind a concrete barrier near the reservoir that supplies water to the 2.6 million residents of Kiev. More than 700 peasants evacuated in 1986 have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium...
...Russian economy. Since Boris Yeltsin began shock treatment last January, the result has been a bundle of contradictions. In the industrial city of Rostov, the mammoth Rostselmash factory still makes grain harvesters that no one wants. The clunkers lose up to 15% of the grain as they pound rich topsoil into brick-hard earth. Yet Yeltsin visited the plant last summer and personally guaranteed tens of millions of rubles in state credits to keep the communist relic afloat...
...Midwest, which still in its renewable fecundity ranks as the world's greatest natural resource, some farms have lost half their topsoil as it sloughed off the hilltops into the gullies and beyond. Stand on a bridge in Vicksburg over the Mississippi River, the old saying goes, and every hour you can watch an Iowa farm go by in the current below. And as the soil moved, it took with it particles of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that polluted the aquifers below...
...plant, cultivate, spray and harvest. Now he makes four trips -- to plant, spray (twice) and harvest -- saving more than $25 an acre. He soon found that his yields went up 10% and something else even more precious: he was helping the land heal and rebuild its delicate mantle of topsoil, without which civilization as we know it would cease to exist...
...garbage dumps, the oil spills, the sewage discharges, the drift nets and factory ships are only the most visible problems. The real threats to the oceans, accounting for 70% to 80% of all maritime pollution, are the sediment and contaminants that flow into the seas from land-based sources -- topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides and all manner of industrial wastes. Coral is particularly sensitive to sediment, and the reefs that fringe Asia, Australia and the Caribbean -- and provide a home to many of the world's fish species -- are already starting...