Word: tree
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven...
...QUIVER TREE This striking giant aloe was given its name by the San people of southern Africa, who use the tree's hollow branches as quivers for their arrows. Scientists have discovered that quiver trees are starting to die off in parts of their traditional range. The species might be in the early stages of moving southward, trying to escape rising temperatures closer to the equator...
...adored wife and son living in exile in Russia, did not attend his funeral. And the remnants of his once all-powerful party put him in the ground in the dark, not in some grand presidential tomb but in a plain grave beneath a 100-year-old linden tree in his sooty Serbian hometown of Pozarevac. A brass band, made up of retired members of the Serb military, played a mournful march, as a handful of the faithful tried to recapture his former glory in speeches blending his trademark nationalist rhetoric with rants against Serbia's manifold alleged enemies. Though...
...police raids, face down customs officials who ordered him to translate his 10,000-book library into Arabic for their perusal, and endure plagues of rats, snakes, locusts, mosquitoes, bees and - as part of a mysterious campaign to force him out - the occasional dead animal dangling from a fruit tree in his garden. And that stuff was easy. The real problems involved jinns, the spirits that many Moroccans accept as hazards of daily life. Shah's new home - a sprawling, decrepit, Arabian Nights complex in Casablanca once owned by a real caliph - was crawling with them. His ever-expanding workforce...
...chainsaw-cut planks line the side of a wharf built from old logs, off-cuts, rocks and mud. The plantation is run by Malaysia's Silvania company; environmentalists say it is a front for a logging concern. The muddy village echoes with the sound of saws chewing through giant tree trunks. Until a few months ago, 16-year-old Leslie Pua called one of these shanties home, sharing a room with her eight siblings. Then the elderly boss of an Asian logging company took a shine to her. Leslie now has a new house and her own room, where...