Word: tree
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Outsiders want in; they fill Midtown's hotels and clot its traffic. Secular pilgrims, they trek to the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center (and to its fellow firs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Lincoln Center). They window-shop on Fifth Ave. - a promenade that remains the city's most bustling theatrical experience. And they see a holiday show - for the kids, and for the vestigial child in most adults...
...example, there is what the locals call the "sex tree," which grows deep in Mabira's dense, tropical bush. It is a skinny, scruffy, slow-developing plant with springy green leaves that is decidedly unremarkable. It has a lonely existence. Other members of its plant family have been uprooted by local aphrodisiac-seekers long...
...need to think about conservation in a scientific way," says Dr Mauda Kamatenesi, a lecturer of botany at Uganda's Makarere University and a lead researcher on Mabira's medicinal plants. Kamatenesi is leading a drive to conserve plants such as Citropsis articulata, or the "sex tree." Also in danger of extinction in Mabira is Pronus africana, which is commonly used to treat malaria and some forms of cancer...
Kamatenesi believes that plants like the "sex tree" may have other medicinal properties besides treating sexual impotence and says that Uganda will miss out on drug discovery and manufacturing if the government does not protect the forest. Researchers also say that the plants' extinction would take a toll on local Ugandans who have been using the trees as herbal cures for generations. Says Kamatenesi: "We are losing out if we let these plants go extinct without doing more research. The people say that the medicines work...
...they did in 2003. Natural-resource industries, for which prices haven't risen substantially, also suffered. "In the month of November there wasn't a single Canadian sawmill that made money," says Russ Taylor, president of forestry consultancy International Wood Markets Group. Nova Scotia's biggest Christmas-tree grower shipped a quarter of a million balsam firs this year, mostly to U.S. stores. Next year they're shutting up shop in Canada altogether, says Mac Kirk at Kirk Forest Products. The strong loonie eroded all their profits. "It is loony," Kirk says...