Word: ecosystems
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...disaster in south Florida is invisible from above water but the damage is horrific. Hundreds of yards of sensitive coral reefs, part of the largest such ecosystem in the United States, have been sliced through by boats in two incidents over the last month. Indeed, because of choppy conditions, the assessment of the damage at one site, a mile offshore from the famed Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, was not possible until this week. It is now believed that a cable line from a tug boat, or possibly lobster traps, cut a swath estimated at about 200 yards long...
...about a century, scientists have been studying the role bacteria play in the gastrointestinal tract, a complex ecosystem made up of helpful and harmful bugs whose interactions aren't fully understood. The bugs begin to infiltrate when we're born. Some make us sick, while others help the body work better. An average adult gut contains about a kilogram of bacteria - 100 trillion bugs of some 500 different species...
...historian Robert Wiebe's words, as a "search for order." America's giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and lawless place where only the strong and savage survived. By the time Roosevelt took office during the Great Depression, the entire ecosystem appeared to be in a death spiral, with Americans crying out for government to take control. F.D.R. did - juicing the economy with unprecedented amounts of government cash, creating new protections for the unemployed and the elderly, and imposing rules for how industry was to behave. Conservatives wailed that economic freedom...
Over the past two decades, wall street and the rest of the financial ecosystem became obsessed with the quantification of risk. Assigning numbers to the chance of something bad happening is a centuries-old endeavor--mortality tables have been used to devise insurance premiums since the 18th century. With modern computing power, though, financial engineers captured, packaged and sold risk exposure in startlingly new ways. Buying protection against a bad corn harvest or a spike in interest rates was just the beginning. Over time, as instruments became more complex, a huge shift occurred. Risk itself became the thing to trade...
...landscapes and basically take care of themselves.” In addition to improving soil and tree health, the sustainable organic method is also more environmentally-sound as the organic plots are less dependent on nitrogen from fertilizers. “The amount of nitrogen being pumped into the ecosystem from fertilizers is having a very serious environmental impact,” said Peter J. del Tredici, a lecturer in landscape architecture and a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. “A lot agricultural nitrogen has run off into aquatic ecosystems and has destroyed...