Word: forestation
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Forest fires come and go. But this year's may be the worst in a half-century; they could prove to be the worst ever recorded. Some 6.5 million acres have already burned, and by the end of last week, 68 large fires were burning in 10 states. Almost everyone agrees the fires are not normal, not part of the harmonious burn-and-regenerate cycle of nature in business for itself. Brittlely dry heat and lightning without moisture, abetted sometimes by man-made sparks, started the fires. Could past human errors, activating a law of unintended consequences, be to blame...
Experts focus on a paradox: too much effective, overzealous fire fighting in years past unwisely extinguished the natural, smaller, healthy burns that any forest needs--fires that clear the lesser undergrowth but spare the big trees. Most foresters agree that small, "prescribed" burns, carefully controlled, are essential to prevent the larger apocalypse...
Galen Hamilton, a tall, fourth-generation logger, contemplates the timbered mountains (ponderosa pine, Douglas fir) where he grew up around Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. He points to vast, unregenerated bald patches burned off in earlier fires he blames on Forest Service fecklessness, and speaks bitterly about Washington's clueless authoritarianism (so he thinks of it) in shutting down logging operations--in letting the forest become a rank, dangerous tinderbox. The sticker on his pickup reads: ARE YOU AN ENVIRONMENTALIST? OR DO YOU WORK FOR A LIVING...
...moment, the scientists report, the robotyke has the brainpower of bacteria: "We hope to get up to insect level in a couple of years." Meantime, in another part of the forest, the human genome project is nearly complete. Peering into the future, one dimly discerns a convergence. Here are the projected patterns...
DIED. THOMAS FORAN, 76, chief prosecutor in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial for riots at the 1968 D.N.C.; in Lake Forest, Ill. Foran won convictions against five of the accused protesters, but they never served time...