Word: vastness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...matter what happens this week in Lausanne, the elephant will still be in some peril. Even if the ivory trade winds down, the elephant will face increasing encroachment from Africa's fast-growing human populations. African farmers or herdsmen trying to eke out a living covet the vast habitats set aside for animals and cannot understand why scarce financial resources go to protect elephants while people go hungry. To many Africans, the elephant is a five-ton nuisance that can trample a season's maize in seconds. As long as they feel that way, they will turn a blind...
...West was won, Los Angeles and the 20th century were built, by the cowboy mind. To the cowboy, nature was a vast wilderness waiting to be tamed. The land was a stage, a backdrop against which he could pursue his individual destiny. The story of the world was the story of a man, usually a white man, and its features took their meaning from their relationship to him. A mountain was a place to test one's manhood; an Asian jungle with its rich life and cultures was merely a setting for an ideological battle. The natives are there...
...distinction between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy and information passing back and forth, a vast complicated network of exchange. Speech, food, posture, infection, respiration, scent are but a few pathways of communication. Most of those circuits are still a mystery, a labyrinth we have barely begun to acknowledge or explore...
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN. John Nevin, the crusty chairman of Firestone, gives credit to Japan's Bridgestone for bailing out his company with a $2.6 billion buyout last year. But that has not removed the vast differences in the ways the two companies communicate. "I'm seen as terribly abrupt and abrasive," says Nevin. "If you're very direct, you're admired in American culture. The Japanese culture is much more subtle. I can never get them to tell me what they actually mean, and they may think I'm rude and crass. But both sides are only behaving in ways familiar...
Sony believes it can help guarantee the success of new hardware by ensuring that potential buyers will have a plentiful supply of entertainment software to play on their new machines. After buying CBS Records in 1987, Sony swiftly began converting the vast CBS library of popular albums by such artists as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand to the booming compact-disc format. Along with the wave of CDs from other companies, the CBS discs helped boost sales of Sony CD players from 2.9 million machines in 1987 to an estimated 6.5 million this year. Sony expects its musical...