Word: layer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...will produce many years of policy paralysis. Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution agrees, noting that societies may pay a price for doing nothing that outweighs ) the expense of prudent preparation. While the world hailed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, designed to reduce chlorofluorocarbon output, the destruction of the ozone layer continued to accelerate because of CFCs already in use. Atmospheric chemist Sherwood Rowland of the University of California at Irvine is worried that similar delays in dealing with global warming will produce a treaty that is "a perfect autopsy...
Today, of course, healthful skies mask the hole in the ozone layer. But in a suddenly peaceful world where the doors of the Iron Curtain have rusted open, no one should ridicule the simple giving of thanks. Each of us has private reasons for gratitude, since in so many ways 1989 has been a bountiful year. For me, I am sincere in my appreciation for the way the greenhouse effect has allowed Indian summer to stretch on into the college basketball season. Moreover, I consider it a personal blessing that Jackie Mason was canceled, Donald Trump failed in his efforts...
...fuel problem under the carpet. Forgetting this once-trendy environmental issue, we have begun buying larger, less gas-efficient cars again. Similarly, Americans seem to be all too quick to forget about conserving water until shortages appear. Furthermore, the general public seemed ambivalent about the depletion of the ozone layer until the media sounded a general alarm. As soon as it was popular and politically expedient, thousands chose to "get involved...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
...that is what photography is up to, then the onion of the world is being peeled away, layer by layer -- lenses like black holes gobbling up life's emanations. Mere images proliferate, while history pares down to a phosphorescence of itself...