Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Ecosystems are naturally resilient, but human impact can reduce their ability to bounce back in many ways. Rain forests withstand some degree of cutting, for instance, but once forest fragments shrink beyond some unknown threshold, the entire system loses its ability to recover. page refers to a recent study led by the University of Michigan's Lisa Curran, who contends that human activities such as logging may have doomed Indonesia's great dipterocarp trees, the anchor of its rain forests...
Halting the decline of the planet's life-support systems may be the most difficult challenge humanity has ever faced. The report specifies some common-sense steps in the right direction. For instance, governments can eliminate the estimated $700 billion in annual subsidies that spur the destruction of ecosystems. In Tunisia, water is priced at one-seventh of what it costs to pump, encouraging waste. In the mid-1980s, Indonesia spent $150 million annually to subsidize pesticide use. With access to cheap chemicals, Indonesian farmers poured pesticides onto their rice fields, killing pests, to be sure, but also causing human...
...these alterations threw the ecosystem into a tailspin. Wading-bird populations have plummeted; sport and commercial fish catches have fallen; 68 of the Everglades' resident species, including the manatee and the panther, have become endangered; and the capacity of the system to store water has shrunk even as human demand for it grows...
...Africa, the environmental leaders I met with described how desperate shortages of human and financial capital impoverish both their peoples--and their land. The resulting loss of biodiversity, they noted, carries a price for us all. For instance, the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar, has proved potent against childhood leukemia. Yet other rare species on this small island nation, most found nowhere else on Earth, are disappearing faster than scientists can catalogue them. The U.S. is working to help developing nations build their economies by preserving, rather than destroying, their natural endowments. But we and other nations must...
After decades of rancorous debate, only a handful of the most doctrinaire die-hards still dispute the idea that human activity is heating up the planet. all the signs seem to point that way: storms have become more intense and weather patterns more erratic; the past decade has been by far the hottest on record; and the rise in temperature has been greatest in polar regions and around cities. These facts dovetail ominously well with the theory that carbon dioxide (CO 2), released by burning coal, oil and gasoline for heat, electricity and transportation, is trapping excess energy from...