Word: verdant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...former Belgian colony after the Hutu ousted the Tutsi elite from power in 1959. In neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire and Uganda, they suffered the indignities of the stateless: scapegoats for the political crises of the day. Through it all, the exiles saw their homeland as a mythical country of verdant hillsides and crystal lakes, whose people and terrain they could glimpse only in textbooks. "I didn't know much about Rwanda," recalls rebel leader Paul Kagame, 37, in a rare quiet moment on the outskirts of Kigali last week. "But I knew it was my country...
Like March itself, spring training is one of those interim periods. In fact, it's downright bizarre. As we northerners rush inside to escape the cold, the boys of summer frolic on the verdant fields of the sunny south. The Mets play the Yankees, the White Sox play the Cubs, yet no championship is up for grabs. And none of it seems to matter much...
...urban pretensions in bigger towns like St. Joseph and Des ! Moines, the region was geared to nature's rhythms, a verdant land of quilted green and slow streams with such names as Skunk and Nodaway. The Flood of '93 stole some of its innocence and its trust. The most frequently cataloged submersibles besides homes and acres of waving grain were bandstands and ball fields. "Summers are what we are all about," insists the Des Moines Register's Larry Fruhling. "This summer was wrecked." Worse, it may have planted fear in the hearts of thousands of the yeomen...
...word circus; it conjures up nothing more magical than slapstick and animal odors. The grand, ethereal Cirque du Soleil is really primal theater -- an age-old blend of music and motion. The weirdly soothing, polylingual background score, which could be elevator music at a harmonious U.N., rolls out a verdant carpet of sound for all the pretty beasts to strut on. At every moment, in every corner of the Cirque world, stagecraft approaches genial witchcraft. It's an out-of-Broadway experience...
Overgrazing by cattle has destroyed grasslands. The "cowburnt" ranges of the American West testify to the damage wrought by decades of uncontrolled grazing, which transformed once verdant land into desert. Of more than 50 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land that is open to grazing, half remains in poor condition. Lands under control of the Bureau of Land Management are in equally bad shape. Driving the cattle off, however, as some radical environmentalists would like, is not necessarily the solution. Properly managed grazing, range ecologists agree, serves to enrich rather than impoverish grasslands. In exchange for forage, hoofed beasts...