Word: extinguisher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Relentless poachers have thinned the ranks of some animals to perilous levels. In the past ten years, for example, they cut Kenya's elephant population from 65,000 to 17,000. This threatens to extinguish not only the species but also income from tourism, which last year totaled $390 million. Kenya's antipoaching rangers have counterattacked, sweeping the armed invaders out of the national parks and killing 23 of them since...
...evacuated from their homes and crowded into schools and hotels. As scattered rain dampened some of the fires in midweek, more than 4,000 evacuees were allowed to return home. But most of the blazes were still burning, and fire fighters said it would take days of rain to extinguish them. No such downpour was forecast...
...allure of the space program, it seems to me, come from its connection with that giddy sense of the unknown. When we explore the universe, we explore ourselves. We seek the source of the cosmic-ray winds that mutate our genes and the comet showers that may periodically extinguish species; we seek the name of that star whose dust is under our fingernails. There is plenty of science in the space program, but the space program is not science; there is technological fallout, but it's not about technology. It's about, or should be about, consciousness and the mystery...
Park officials maintain that they can only contain the fires, not extinguish them. Meanwhile, defenders of the natural-burn policy trumpet its benefits: the flames clear thick stands of timber and prepare the soil for a new generation of flora. For example, many of the seed cones of the lodgepole pine, which covers 60% of the park, only open after being exposed to intense heat. Ecologists expect the fires to help restore the park's depleted stands of aspen trees and increase the wide array of insects, birds and mammals that have found Yellowstone's aging forests increasingly inhospitable...
...referring to horror, and a good many people do not want it done. In the regular processes of human cruelty, nobody is arguing against competition or any of the subtler forms of combat. It's just that using brains to extinguish brains seems a little direct. Developing balance to knock somebody off-balance, honing eyesight to administer shiners, marshaling memory and ingenuity and audacity and dexterity -- and coordinating all of them against themselves, and against coordination -- seems self-destructive to a society...