Word: rebuilds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although few restoration projects are more than a decade old, many have already begun to generate encouraging results. In Costa Rica, University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel Janzen is helping rebuild a nearly extinct tropical dry forest in the 110,000-hectare (272,000-acre) Guanacaste Conservation Area, which until five years ago had been overrun by cattle and torched annually by ranchers and hunters. In California, at the Nature Conservancy's Coachella Valley Preserve, a few dozen volunteers felled thousands of salt cedar trees that had sucked this small desert area nearly dry, clearing the way for the reappearance...
Even when restorationists have some notion of how to begin, they face a daunting enterprise. "You can destroy a prairie in two hours," observes Robert Betz, a Northeastern Illinois University biology professor. "But to rebuild it might take half a century or more." Essential to the task is identifying the dynamic process that shaped each ecosystem and, if need be, putting it back into play. Prairies and bur oak woodlands, for instance, were both created by fire. Without fire, their bright flowers and luxuriant grasses are shaded out by invading brush. Where in centuries past roving bands of Plains Indians...
...hired thugs killed hundreds of peasants in Haiti's northwestern province in July 1987, Aristide was there to denounce the massacre. Four months later, when paramilitary forces burned down a central market in Port-au-Prince, Aristide was there to excoriate the perpetrators and to raise money to rebuild the place. When one military dictator after another came to power promising democracy down the road, Aristide dismissed them, one after another, with an ironic Creole proverb and a blistering sermon. He never gave the least philosophical quarter to those he perceived as "roadblocks to the liberation of the Haitian people...
...Association of America and a former Fed governor. "We are paying the price for what we did in the past with this enormous federal deficit. The price goes beyond the poor functioning of the economy now. Here we are, this great, wealthy, affluent nation, and we cannot afford to rebuild our highways or bridges. We cannot afford to have a really serious war on drugs. We cannot afford to improve our educational system. This is absurd...
...Politically, his aim is to demonstrate, by repeatedly tweaking the U.S., that he not only has survived but also remains a force to be reckoned with. Ultimately, he hopes, the world will weary of endless inconclusive showdowns and shift its attention elsewhere; he will be left in peace to rebuild his military machine until he attains the regional dominance that he was attempting to achieve when the gulf war began...