Word: cannot
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...real difficulty with sustaining a useful connection with nature, though, comes from the fact that nature does not seek to make a connection with us. It is a hard truth to swallow, but nature does not care if we live or die. We cannot survive without the oceans, for example, but they can do just fine without us. One might surmise that the natural world exists to test our capacity to care or to preserve ourselves, but even that little fancy is man-made. Nature goes its own way, headless and heartless, and one either responds to it or does...
What really distinguishes PAGE is its approach. It's significant that two of the sponsoring agencies--the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank--deal primarily with economic development. Their participation acknowledges an inescapable fact: economies cannot remain forever healthy in an unhealthy environment. PAGE looks at the natural world in a new way: not just as a beautiful place that should be preserved for aesthetic or moral reasons but also as an economic asset that delivers irreplaceable goods and services. Ecosystems temper climate, purify and store water, recycle wastes, produce food and support all the other things that make...
...best hope may be that even where governments lag, their people understand both the stakes and the urgent need for action. When I visited China, I met with environmentalists in the scenic city of Guilin. One woman spoke passionately of growing environmental awareness at the grassroots. But this movement cannot take hold and succeed, she told me, without our help. "If Americans don't want to give up this good opportunity," she said, "you have to take action...
Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that it cannot be seen edgewise from a satellite yet so prodigiously diverse that only a tiny fraction of species have been discovered and named. The products of billions of years of evolution, organisms occupy virtually every square centimeter of the planet's surfaces and fill nearly every imaginable niche...
Slowly comes the surreal sight of a green plastic toothbrush emerging from the bird's gullet. With her neck arched, the mother cannot fully pass the straight brush. She tries several times to disgorge it, but can't. Nancy and I can hardly bear this. The albatross reswallows and, with the brush stuck inside, wanders away...