Word: localitis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...helped that the WWF would pay much more than Moscow or local governments could afford to give men on the front line against poaching. At first Fomenko worked alone, but he now oversees three dozen men in 14 brigades. The rangers, as he calls the ecological policemen, earn as much as $300 a month, a good salary in Russia. In all, the WWF will dedicate $2 million this year to protect 1 million sq. mi. of Russia's Far East...
Pritchard has done his most innovative work along the Atlantic coast in Guyana, a haven for sea turtles. By the 1960s, overhunting by local Arawak Indians--themselves an endangered group--had ravaged the turtle population. But Pritchard helped save both turtles and tribe: he has lobbied Guyana and private sources for grants that have weaned the Arawaks off turtle meat and into chicken farming. And he hires Arawaks to tag turtles for research and defend nesting grounds. The killing has largely stopped, he says, because turtle protection is now "a family discipline thing" among Arawaks, "rather than an outsider laying...
...world. And then, of course, there's the unusual. The Guyana government is negotiating with a Texas firm to build a commercial space port to launch communications satellites near Pritchard's primitive Arawak camp. Pritchard in turn is urging the company to show its good intentions toward the local ecosytem by creating a wildlife sanctuary beside the launching pad. That might widen the turtles' smiles...
That was easier said than done. In the macho culture of Sicily and Calabria, just across the straits, there was a tradition of hunting migrating raptors. So when this earnest young woman began badgering police, forest rangers and local authorities to do something about the illegal killing, she was not taken seriously. But she organized camps of young people who gathered each spring to observe the migrations and inform police when they saw poachers at work...
...Once local authorities started cooperating, Giordano's efforts paid off dramatically. Before she began monitoring the poachers, more than 5,000 supposedly protected birds--mostly honey buzzards, falcons, storks, orioles, kestrels and swallows--were slaughtered each year. Today the count averages less than 100 in Sicily, although more than 500 on the Calabrian side of the straits. On a recent tour of saltwater lakes on the outskirts of Messina, Giordano proudly pointed to the dozens of cormorants perched on wooden posts in the shallow water. "Twenty years ago," she says, "you would not have seen even one cormorant here. People...