Word: soils
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Ciskei is an even less likely candidate for self-reliance. Its barren, eroded soil supports few crops or even trees. The pastoral people subsist on beans, maize, goats and a few dairy cattle. A drought last summer was so severe that it took $9.28 million in emergency aid from Pretoria to avert mass starvation. Though the territory is already densely populated, the government, under a "resettlement" program, sends in truckloads of unwanted blacks from urban areas. Once in Ciskei, many of the new arrivals live in stark tent towns with no schools, shops or running water...
Though the Agrarians mostly remained farmers of the typewriter in real life, on paper they kept insisting that "the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations." Tate was one of the few to own, briefly, a genuine farm, Ben's Folly, honestly named for the brother who financed it. A hired hand delivered the final word on Farmer Tate: "Mr. Tate, he ain't much of a hand with...
Without Syria or the P.L.O., the summit could not register any real progress on the centerpiece of common Arab policy, Palestinian self-determination. It merely reaffirmed the P.L.O. as "the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" and endorsed "independent statehood on Palestinian soil." In so doing, the conference seemed to reject the idea of a Palestinian state in Jordan, which many Arab observers ascribe to the incoming Reagan Administration...
After houses come gardens. A big house is one way to establish Paradise, but a garden, historically, is a more appropriate place to start. The childish "What if that envisions a mansion is not nearly so ambitious as one that seeks to transplant cypresses from one soil to another (as Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden...
...Comptroller General has cited half a dozen harmful substances detected in unusual quantities in super-sealed buildings. Among them: carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, both byproducts of smoking, gas stoves and leaky furnaces; the radioactive gas radon, which results from the natural decay of radium, an element found in soil, rocks and other building materials; and numerous particles of dust, soot and asbestos...