Word: throwaway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Never mind, Fukuyama seems to say: "For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in . . . the common ideological heritage of mankind." This passage, almost a throwaway line amid the references to Hegel and the main strands of Fukuyama's argument, stands out nonetheless. It will be particularly embarrassing when "post-history" produces its first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two backward and strange- thinking countries that never cared much for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is beyond...
...local loggers, the tribe's real antagonists are some 2,600 miles away, in Japan. Most of the trees cut in the Malaysian part of Borneo (the rest of the island is controlled by Indonesia and Brunei) are shipped to Japan, where the lumber is most often made into throwaway plywood construction forms used to mold concrete. Nor is the situation in Borneo unusual. Japan's heavy demand for wood has led to the deforestation of vast tracts in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Last April the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network, a small but feisty environmental...
...there are precious few methods of effective disposal, and each has its own drawbacks. As landfills reach capacity, new sites become scarcer and more expensive. Incinerators, burdensome investments for many communities, also have serious limitations: contaminant-laden ash residue itself requires a dump site. Rising consumer demands for more throwaway packaging add to the volume...
...roll making rude noises on the periphery -- attacking the soul when it is restlessly idling between gigs. Bird, for all his troubles, is a wonderfully attractive figure, delighting in the lilt of big words and fine phrases, turning the memory of the moment he found his style into a throwaway comic anecdote. When he steals a saxophone from a rival who has gone over to rock, he tootles a few notes on it and says contemptuously, "I wanted to see if it could play more than one note at a time...
...large part, the garbage crisis is a cultural crisis. The development of a throwaway, convenience culture helped create this mess; a real solution may require cultural change. For example, more than 20% of U.S. garbage comprises grass clippings and leaves stuffed into plastic bags and left for collection. Householders should simply leave that grass on their lawns or rake - it into a mulch pile, ignoring and thus revising the cultural demand for a golf green-neat lawn. Another cultural change would be required to get Americans to recycle 50% of their trash, as Japanese do. Cultural change is notoriously slow...