climate canary
n.— «They are dubbed the “climate canaries”—the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers sit down in Nairobi at this weekend’s United Nations Climate Conference, the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a few hundred miles away from their deliberations. Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya, whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now face eradication» —“3 Million Kenya Herdsmen Face Extinction From Global Warming” African News Dimension (Johannesburg, South AFrica) Nov. 12, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
She sells seashells by the seashore. Who is the she in this tongue twister? Some claim it’s the young Mary Anning, who went on to become a famous 19th-century British paleontologist. Dubious perhaps, but the story of her rise from seaside...