Word: watered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...problem is much bigger than the U.S. The whole industrialized world is getting polluted, and emerging nations are unlikely to slow their own development in the interest of clearer air and cleaner water. The fantastic effluence of affluence is overwhelming natural decay-the vital process that balances life in the natural world. All living things produce toxic wastes, including their own corpses. But whereas nature efficiently decays-and thus reuses-the wastes of other creatures, man alone produces huge quantities of synthetic materials that almost totally resist natural decay. And more and more such waste is poisonous...
...fast as green plants manufactured it. Only by some primeval accident were the greedy organisms buried in sedimentary rock (as the source of crude oil, for example), thus permitting the atmosphere to become enriched to a life-sustaining mix of 20% oxygen, plus nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide and water vapor. With miraculous precision, the mix was then maintained by plants, animals and bacteria, which used and returned the gases at equal rates. About 70% of the earth's oxygen is thus produced by ocean phytoplankton: passively floating plants. All this modulated temperatures, curbed floods and nurtured man a mere...
...polluting sense, man is the dirtiest animal, and he must learn that he can no longer afford to vent smoke casually into the sky and sewage into rivers as he did in an earlier day, when vast reserves of pure air and water easily diluted the pollutants. The earth is basically a closed system with a waste-disposal process that clearly has limits. The winds that ventilate earth are only six miles high; toxic garbage can kill the tiny organisms that normally clean rivers. Today, industrial America is straining the limits...
...Water & the Sewer...
...power to generate electricity in place of smoggy "fossil fuels" (oil, coal), but even with 50% nuclear power, U.S. energy needs will so increase by 2000 that fossil-fuel use may quadruple. Moreover, nuclear plants emit pollution: not only radioactive wastes, which must be buried, but also extremely hot water that has to go somewhere and can become a serious threat to marine life...