Word: worlds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...analysis of admittedly spotty temperature records indicates that the world's average temperature has gone up about 0.5[degree]C (1[degree]F) in the past century, with the '90s being the hottest decade in recent history. This fact is quoted widely in the scientific community, although there are nagging doubts even among researchers. Recent satellite records, using different kinds of instrumentation, fail to show a warming trend...
...looking down, I saw the sea bottom carpeted with the corpses of whitetip reef sharks, grotesquely stripped of their fins by poachers who had slashed them off to sell to the soup markets of Asia and had cast the living animals back into the sea to die. Around the world, the numbers of some shark species have declined as much as 80%. Some may already be practically extinct; the survivors in the current generation may be too few to replace themselves...
Daily, weapons of mass destruction are deployed in seas the world over: long lines spanning up to 80 miles, dangling scores of thousands of baited hooks; enormous nets, nearly invisible in water. These indiscriminate killers drown everything, including birds and mammals, that takes the bait or blunders into the mesh. The unwanted--a quarter of everything caught--is discarded, left to rot or, sometimes, taken aboard to be ground into meal and fertilizer...
...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...
...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 precious and/or fashionable, wild places...