Word: wildness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Where fishing in the wild has been banned outright, fish stocks are starting to come back. Where "street-sweeper" trawls that devastate the seabed have been prohibited, nurseries and habitats are beginning to recover...
...influential forester Aldo Leopold wrote, "I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" Fifty-four years later, it's not so easy to find wild country to be young in. For now, however, a few tracts of wilderness still endure. We should be grateful for this and appreciate them as long...
...destiny of wild places in the coming century can be read in the numbers. The 6 billion people living on the planet are projected to swell to 9 billion by 2050. The pressure to exploit the world's remaining wilderness for natural resources, food and human habitation will become overwhelming. But bulldozers and chain saws aren't the only threats. A new menace has emerged from the least likely quarter; in many cases, the very people who care most passionately about empty places are hastening their demise...
...eagerly abetted by Madison Avenue. These days it's impossible to turn on a television or open a magazine without being assaulted by a barrage of ads that use skillfully packaged images of wilderness activities to rev the engine of consumerism. In 1851, when Henry David Thoreau declared, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," he could not have foreseen that wilderness, as an idea, would one day be used to sell everything from SUVs to soda pop. Disconcerting though this development may be, it happens to come with a substantial upside; because wilderness is now esteemed as something...
...course, when wilderness is so intensely managed, it ceases to be wild. It becomes a toothless simulacrum. It becomes a park. On an increasingly crowded planet there is probably no alternative. It is simply an unhappy fact of life on the cusp of the 21st century...