Word: wildness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...penguins. Instead the terrain is uncannily authentic, and animals are free to behave like, well, animals, not inmates. Here is a Himalayan highland full of red pandas, there a subtropical jungle where it rains indoors, eleven times a day. The effect is of an entire globe miraculously concentrated, the wild kingdom contained in downtown Chicago or the North Bronx. As American zoos are renovated and redesigned -- at a cost of more than a billion dollars since 1980 -- hosts of once jaded visitors, some even without children, are flooding through the gates. "In the past 15 years," says Cincinnati zoo director...
...increased drama in the exhibits themselves, the real revolution is going on behind the scenes and out in the wild, where a state of emergency exists. To begin with, most zoos no longer take animals from the jungle; they grow their own. About 90% of the mammals and 75% of the birds now in U.S. zoos were bred in captivity, and some are even being carefully reintroduced to their native environs. At the same time, zoo-affiliated organizations like Wildlife Conservation International are working to save whole habitats in 38 countries in Africa, Asia and South America and to reduce...
Though many of these outlying efforts have been wildly successful, the zoos themselves are still the front line. A child who rubs noses, even through the plate glass, with a polar bear or a penguin may be far more likely to mature into an eager conservationist than into one who sees animals as toys or accessories. It is hard to walk around a good zoo without caring, deeply, about whether this miraculous wealth of lovely, peculiar, creepy, unfathomable creatures survives or perishes. And it will be a great sorrow if zoos are ever the last place on earth where...
...politics was local politics. A Missoula newspaper gave second billing to statehood, emphasizing instead the selection of the first U.S. Senators. "It was a surprise to us to learn how modern Missoula was," says museum director Wes Hardin. "The image of a wild and woolly Montana was not true. There were flush toilets, electricity and a horse-drawn streetcar system." One of the city's living relics is the Oxford, a rough-hewn downtown saloon known simply as "the Ox," whose claimed lineage variously dates back as far as 1883. Draft beer comes for 50 cents a pop; a woman...
...Ernest Hemingway and Tom McGuane. You search for what fathers or uncles in an earlier generation used to pass down over dinner tables or around campfires: secrets of the water, hints about how to read streams and tread them lightly, how to intuit the mysterious nature of the wild trout...