Word: humanities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Another simple but vitally important move would be to reinvigorate the U.S. commitment to family planning at home and abroad. Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, points out that humanity consumes or wastes 40% of the total amount of energy stored by photosynthesis in terrestrial vegetation. No one knows how much more people can devour before they begin to exhaust resources and crowd out vital ecosystems. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute argues that global annual food production already falls short of human consumption and that environmental degradation reduces yields 1% annually at a time when world population...
...Valdez spill was only a trivial occurrence compared with the far- reaching, perhaps irreversible processes that were unfolding around the world. The earth's population, now 5.2 billion, rose in 1989 an estimated 87.5 million, maintaining a growth rate that could double the number of human beings by the year 2025. Deforestation and burning of fossil fuels spewed at least 19 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, aggravating the global warming process that could cause the average worldwide temperature to rise as much as 4.5 degrees C (8 degrees F) within the next 60 years. Another 11.3 million...
...Atlanta, circa 1948-73). What you will not find in this marvelously understated movie is overtly inspirational comments on that subject, broad sentimentality or the slightest pomposity about its own mission. In other words, Alfred Uhry's adaptation of his Pulitzer-prizewinning play aspires more to complex observation of human behavior than to simple moralism about it. Precisely because it has its priorities straight, it succeeds superbly on both levels...
...changes are so monumental. So different. But it did not seem overwhelming when we sat down. Two reasonable people sat down with their staffs. Even the contentious matters were brought up without rancor. When I first met him in Moscow when I was Vice President and brought up human rights, he grew very heated. This time he talked very rationally, not rancorously...
...Well, I wouldn't be human if I didn't confess to a certain amount of ego gratification. When I stood in front of the foreign policy establishment in the Soviet Union and was given a generally empathetic reception, I had a sense of, if you will, historical vindication. But I also had a sense of something much more important. There was a breakthrough taking place in the thinking of people who for 70 years were artificially divorced from the intellectual and philosophical currents of the Western world. They are now in the process of restoring some of those connections...