Word: using
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Marker, 45, first encountered cheetahs 25 years ago; they were in captivity at the Oregon wildlife park where she worked. Over the years she developed a successful cheetah breeding program. In the 1980s Marker made several trips to Namibia, where she began to use a cheetah she had raised in Oregon, named Khayam, to study the possibility of returning the cats to the wild. Although the animal hunted and killed by instinct, without the 18 to 22 months of training that a young cheetah gets from its mother, Khayam couldn't learn how to survive...
...Marker realized that if she was going to get serious about cheetah conservation, she'd have to move to Africa. In 1990 she negotiated the use of three farms near a national game reserve and set up the Cheetah Conservation Fund, transforming old farm buildings into an office and research center for scientists and students. More important, she opened a dialogue with local farmers. When she arrived, she recalls, "they were killing cheetahs right, left and center...
Less familiar is the havoc wreaked on the nitrogen cycle. Through the use of fertilizers, the burning of fossil fuels and land clearing, humanity has doubled the levels of nitrogen compounds that can be used by living things. But those levels are more than can be efficiently absorbed by plants and animals and recycled into the atmosphere. These excess nitrogen compounds wash into fresh- and saltwater systems, where they produce dead zones by stimulating suffocating growths of algae. Since the global food system is based on aggressive use of fertilizer, restoring the balance of the nitrogen cycle poses a daunting...
...right direction. For instance, governments can eliminate the estimated $700 billion in annual subsidies that spur the destruction of ecosystems. In Tunisia, water is priced at one-seventh of what it costs to pump, encouraging waste. In the mid-1980s, Indonesia spent $150 million annually to subsidize pesticide use. With access to cheap chemicals, Indonesian farmers poured pesticides onto their rice fields, killing pests, to be sure, but also causing human illness and wiping out birds and other creatures that ate the pests. When Indonesia ended the subsidies in 1986, pesticide use dropped dramatically with no ill effects on rice...
...learning this lesson in its multibillion-dollar effort to halt the decline of the Everglades, the "river of grass" that once covered 4,500 sq. mi. (11,700 sq km) in Florida. Having spent much of this century channeling, damming and diverting Everglades water for urban and agricultural use, state and federal politicians have watched with growing alarm as these alterations threw the ecosystem into a tailspin. Wading-bird populations have plummeted; sport and commercial fish catches have fallen; 68 of the Everglades' resident species, including the manatee and the panther, have become endangered; and the capacity of the system...