Word: topsoil
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...lived not in the outback, but in the middle of the luxuriant cosatal forest between the mountains and Bass Strait. The woods were full of tree ferns; the trees were full of parrots. The topsoil was three feet thick. A welcoming kind of land, you would think...
...foreigners are swallowing up U.S. agricultural land from Georgia to California. To hear many farmers and farm-belt politicians tell it, at least half the population of Europe and maybe a few million Arabs and Japanese are storming ashore, moneybags in hand, to buy every spare square inch of topsoil...
...slashed and burned at a perilous rate. This is being done both to extend agriculture and, especially in the impoverished developing countries, to use the wood as a fuel. By desiccating and destroying the land, the ruthless felling of trees has still another harmful side effect: it exposes rich topsoil, or humus, and allows the escape of CO2 formerly trapped...
Today, according to the report, a five-mile wedge of Seveso has been successfully detoxified, at a cost of $32 million, by government teams that cleared and buried entire acres of plants and even topsoil. Most of the 736 residents who were originally evacuated have been able to return to their homes, but 285 are still locked out of a 215-acre area enclosed by the yellow fence. That inner bulls-eye remains blighted by concentrated "leopard spots" of contamination and continues to defy all attempts at purification. "It may be a wasteland forever-we just don't know...
...guessing that we got wiped out today," he reported, "but I'm not about to go out into the fields to find out-the air is so black I might get lost." In eastern Colorado, too, gusts of wind up to 90 m.p.h. scooped up the drought-dry topsoil, hurling some five tons of the precious dirt off each acre of land during a 24-hour storm. Observed Rod Johnson, a federal agriculture official: "The eastern three-fourths of Kiowa County is moving...