Word: growing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...their code language for material that was too broad, too mainstream. Saturday Night Live may not quite have become the Carol Burnett Show of the '80s, but complacency has crept in. Perhaps it was inevitable. TV anniversaries, after all, serve another important function. They remind us that shows grow...
...farm runoff have transformed more than 20,000 acres of Everglades saw grass into cattails. These intruders, which thrive in high-nutrient water, suck the oxygen from the marsh and suffocate aquatic life at the bottom of the Everglades food chain. On shallow ponds and canals, nutrient-fed algae grow so thick that they block the sun from underwater plants. So far, most of the damage is confined to Loxahatchee National Wildlife Preserve -- an Everglades habitat abutting the farms -- and state conservation areas just north of the national park. "It's like a cancer," says park superintendent Finley...
...Time and again, the forest has defied predictions that it was doomed. But now the danger is more real and imminent than ever before as loggers level trees, dams flood vast tracts of land and gold miners poison rivers with mercury. In Peru the forests are being cleared to grow coca for cocaine production. "It's dangerous to say the forest will disappear by a particular year," says Philip Fearnside of Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon, "but unless things change, the forest will disappear...
...reptiles and 60 of amphibians. Each type of tree may support more than 400 insect species. In many cases the plants and animals assume Amazonian proportions: lily pads that are 3 ft. or more across, butterflies with 8-in. wingspans and a fish called the pirarucu, which can grow to more than 7 ft. long. Amid the vast assortment of jungle life, creatures command every trick in nature's book to fool or repel predators, attract mates and grab food. Caterpillars masquerade as snakes, plants exude the smell of rotting meat to attract flies as pollinators, and trees rely...
Instead of model settlements, the Polonoroeste project has produced impoverished itinerants. Settlers grow rice, corn, coffee and manioc for a few years until the meager soil is exhausted, then move deeper into the forest to clear new land. The farming and burning thus become a perpetual cycle of depredation. Thousands of pioneers give up on farming altogether and migrate to the Amazon's new cities to find work. For many the net effect of the attempt to colonize Rondonia has been a shift from urban slums to Amazonian slums. Says Donald Sawyer, a demographer from the University of Minas Gerais...