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- <text id=89TT2460>
- <title>
- Sep. 18, 1989: From The Publisher
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Sep. 18, 1989 Torching The Amazon
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 6
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Flying high above the verdant Amazon jungle, TIME
- correspondent Eugene Linden experienced a kind of epiphany. "I
- had thoughts oddly similar to those I had when I flew in a small
- plane across the Arctic -- a sense of reassurance that the world
- still contained places so immense and so empty of people,"
- recalls Linden, who wrote this week's cover story. "But while
- the emptiness of the Arctic is austere, the forest canopy that
- seems to extend into infinity is choked with life."
- </p>
- <p> Linden has explored the complex and sometimes tragic
- relationships between humans and nature in several books,
- including Silent Partners, which considers the implications of
- language experiments with apes. For this week's article Linden
- spent ten days crisscrossing the region by air, water and land
- to assess the Amazon's chances for survival. Says Linden: "The
- question is whether the concern everyone now has about the
- environment will translate into meaningful action."
- </p>
- <p> Washington correspondent Dick Thompson pursued that
- question by joining a congressional fact-finding mission to the
- Amazon. The local contingent of our jungle team, Rio de Janeiro
- bureau chief Laura Lopez and reporter John Maier, made its own
- treks through the region. Maier was struck by how virtually
- everyone in the region, politician and peasant alike, knew that
- the Amazon was the subject of intense international debate. In
- speaking with one poor farmer near the Peruvian border, Maier
- reports, "As soon as I began asking questions, the farmer said
- to me, `Whose side are you on, the environmentalists' or ours?'"
- That question, Maier knew, has no simple answer.
- </p>
- <p> This week Massacre in Beijing: China's Struggle for
- Democracy ($5.95) will go on sale. Overseen by special projects
- editor Donald Morrison, the paperback includes eyewitness
- accounts and analysis of the events in Tiananmen Square from
- Beijing bureau chief Sandra Burton, correspondents David Aikman
- and Richard Hornik and reporter Jaime FlorCruz.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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