Word: less
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...associated with success, ambition, excitement, the procession of multitudes, as well as with crime and squalor, and those that tend toward an appreciation of serene majesty, passivity, mystery, solitude, pastoral virtues and a different kind of wildness. Both worlds are beautiful--city lamps on a winter night are no less attractive than a swaying kelp forest. The trouble is that nature usually loses in this tug-of-war, in part because it cannot compete in modern terms. Nature is undemocratic; in the wilds, wet or dry, the individual has no dignity. The strong eat the weak...
...Less familiar is the havoc wreaked on the nitrogen cycle. Through the use of fertilizers, the burning of fossil fuels and land clearing, humanity has doubled the levels of nitrogen compounds that can be used by living things. But those levels are more than can be efficiently absorbed by plants and animals and recycled into the atmosphere. These excess nitrogen compounds wash into fresh- and saltwater systems, where they produce dead zones by stimulating suffocating growths of algae. Since the global food system is based on aggressive use of fertilizer, restoring the balance of the nitrogen cycle poses a daunting...
...that even these efforts will bring back the Everglades. The unsettling prospect that the planet's richest nation may not have the wherewithal to restore a vital ecosystem underscores a theme that runs through the U.N. report and should guide development decisions in the coming years: it is far less expensive to halt destructive practices before an ecosystem collapses than it is to try to put things back together later...
...turbines. "The technology was originally developed in the 1960s," says Williams, "to let nuclear power plants store excess electricity during off-peak hours." Now it could permit countries rich in wind resources--including China, the U.S., Denmark and Germany--to take advantage of a free, unlimited and nearly pollution-less source of electricity...
...most devastated fish populations a chance to rebuild--could ultimately enable us to catch at least 10 million more tons of sea life than we do now. Government-subsidized shipbuilders and fleets drive much of the overfishing. Eliminating those subsidies--as New Zealand has already done--would mean paying less to get more in the long...