Word: watered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is an old science experiment in which a frog is put into a pan of water, and the water is slowly heated to the boiling point. The frog sits there and boils because its nervous system will not react to the gradual increase. But if you boil the water first and then put the frog in, it immediately jumps...
...powerful catalyst for worldwide public opinion. Everyone suddenly sensed that this gyrating globe, this precious repository of all the life that we know of, ^ was in danger. No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home. Thus in a rare but not unprecedented departure from its tradition of naming a Man of the Year, TIME has designated Endangered Earth as Planet of the Year...
Toxic waste and radioactive contamination could lead to shortages of safe drinking water, the sine qua non of human existence. And in a world that could house between 8 billion and 14 billion people by the mid-21st century, there is a strong likelihood of mass starvation. It is even possible to envision the world so wryly and chillingly prophesied by the typewriting cockroach in Donald Marquis' archy and mehitabel: "man is making deserts of the earth/ it wont be long now/ before man will have it used up/ so that nothing but ants/ and centipedes and scorpions/ can find...
...vaccines, the development of efficient transportation and communication systems. But, increasingly, technology has come up against the law of unexpected consequences. Advances in health care have lengthened life-spans, lowered infant-mortality rates and, thus, aggravated the population problem. The use of pesticides has increased crop yields but polluted water supplies. The invention of automobiles and jet planes has revolutionized travel but sullied the atmosphere...
...greenhouse gases at all. Solar power is especially attractive. It produces no waste, and it is inexhaustible. Not all solar power comes directly from the sun: both wind and hydroelectric power are solar, since wind is created by the sun's uneven warming of the atmosphere and since the water / that collects behind dams was originally rain, which in turn was water vapor evaporated by solar heating...