Word: ecosystems
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...extinction, and the implications were ominous. Says Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, architect of the Administration's natural-resource policy: "This really isn't about just preserving strange species with incomprehensible names. In every single case, that species is the warning light about the decline in productivity of an ecosystem." In the past, the debate was framed in terms of economics vs. environment. But, observed Clinton, "the one cannot exist without the other." Pollution from logging operations in the Northwest, for example, runs off into rivers and threatens the spawning grounds of salmon. And if the salmon...
...this prime parcel of public land, an approach that could signal a fundamental shift in the way U.S. parkland is managed. "We can't defend the Everglades -- or Yellowstone -- just at their boundaries," says Jim Webb, regional director of the Wilderness Society. "We have to deal with the whole ecosystem...
...ecosystem in question once covered the entire tip of Florida -- about 4 ! million acres of wetland stretching from Lake Okeechobee in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. For centuries it was treated like a huge swamp to be drained, farmed and, ultimately, paved. Now the acreage has shrunk to 2 million, and what remains is under pressure from a population growing by 600 people...
...until the middle of this century that the nature of that ecosystem was understood. The Everglades, it turns out, is not a swamp at all but a shallow, sheetlike river, about 50 miles wide, flowing almost imperceptibly from Okeechobee to the sea. It is a leisurely process, a self- perpetuating cycle in which clouds draw moisture from the slow-moving stream, blow north and then rain down on the lakes and rivers that drain into the Okeechobee and back to the Everglades...
...acting U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen, who filed the first lawsuit, and Carol Browner, who headed Florida's Department of Environmental Regulation from 1991 through '92 and is now chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. To purify the runoff and restore some of the sheetlike flow of the original ecosystem, the state of Florida proposed setting aside around 35,000 acres of cropland to act as "filtering marshes." Irrigation water drained from the fields would be held in the treatment areas until natural action of plant life lowers the phosphorus content to acceptable levels...