Word: tree
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...course, some people are naturally conservative; they avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't want to have to go out on a limb when they don't know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be partially junked and replaced by the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around the point...
Three weeks ago, it was snowing. In late April. These last few days, though, the summer heat has been downright oppressive. One could almost sit languidly under a tree, sipping lemonade and watching throngs of beautiful bronzed bodies darting about in carefree games of Frisbee or volleyball. Almost--because the minute you actually started enjoying this come-from-behind sunshine, your conscience should have rebelled. What are we arrogant homo sapiens doing, reaping the sweet fruits of our heinous interference with weather systems and our unconscionable rape of the global climate...
Disturbed by shortages of firewood, the essential fuel for Kenya's poor, as well as growing soil erosion and deforestation, Wangari Maathai began a small tree-planting operation in Nairobi in the late 1970s. Composed largely of women, her Green Belt Movement quickly spread throughout Kenya and beyond. Then she turned to politics, including an unsuccessful run for President and protests against reckless development. When President Daniel arap Moi wanted to erect a 62-story office tower in Uhuru (Freedom) Park, a vital public space, her band of mothers and grandmothers forced the dictator to back down...
...people scoffed and said it was the fuddy-duddy Prince who was out of touch. And as for talking to his plants--well, they shook their heads and remembered the madness of the Prince's forebear, King George III, who famously struck up a conversation with a tree that he had mistaken for the King of Prussia...
Time and again, we find that plants and animals make strange molecules that chemists would never devise in their wildest dreams (and chemists do dream of chemicals in their wildest dreams). For example, researchers could not have invented the anticancer compound taxol, taken from the Pacific yew tree. It is too fiendishly complex a chemical structure, says natural-products chemist Gordon Cragg, of the U.S. National Cancer Institute...