The Great Land: Boom or Doom

ONLY a few years ago, much of the earth still seemed as desolate and inaccessible as the moon. Now the wastes of Antarctica have been surveyed and found replete with coal; modern cities are sprouting in Siberia. Roads penetrate Africa's rain forests, leading to lodes of tin, bauxite and uranium. Arabian deserts are crisscrossed with oil pipelines; even the ocean depths may soon be farmed and mined.

Yet as men use more and more of the earth's bounty, troubling questions arise. Is it worth cutting the hardwood reserves of the Amazon River basin if the price is the destruction of...

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