Word: ecosystems
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...breakthroughs from 1900 to 1965. Included were such striking individual achievements as Weber's analyses of bureaucracy, Gandhi's ideas on nonviolent action, and Mao Tse-tung's theories of peasant and guerrilla organization, as well as concepts developed by scholarly teams: general systems analysis, cybernetics, ecosystem theories and structural linguistics. The researchers constructed their own criteria for inclusion on the list. One key question: Did the advance lead to further knowledge rather than merely having an impact on social science practice...
Industry's problem is almost as complex as an ecosystem. Because many environmental standards differ from state to state, industries in lenient states have an economic edge over competitors in tough states?and thus an incentive to resist pollution abatement. If they close polluting plants, moreover, they throw employees out of work, and employment is part of a corporation's social responsibility. Beyond this is the problem of who shall pay for anti-pollution devices. Ultimately the consumer, of course, but how much will he accept...
...Entomological Society of America, Metcalf pointed out that mosquitoes, May flies, midges and stone flies spend a great part of their lives as larvae in the water before metamorphosing into their more familiar buzzing selves. In a controlled experiment, Metcalf built a small tank to duplicate the ecosystem of a lake and its shore. He discovered that adult mosquitoes leaving the tank contained concentrations of DDT 100,000 times as strong as could be found in the water itself...
...north is a simple ecosystem with few distinct species. While a lake in California may contain several hundred species of phytoplankton, an Arctic lake has only a dozen. This lack of diversity, in ecological terms, is tantamount to vulnerability. Any species can be wiped out and no other species will take its place. The result is expressed in a word that many Alaskans have come to hate: fragility. Says Walter Hickel: "It used to be the hostile, frozen north; now it's the goddamn fragile tundra...
Ecologists are particularly concerned about the future effects of chemicals on the extremely complex tropical ecosystem. They know that removal of even one element, like leaves, will touch off a chain of related changes-all of them probably for the worse...