Word: dam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Year Plans, and that attempts to contradict this truth must end in the grotesque. The revulsion with politics reflects the view that when politicians go about tinkering with something as organic as a poor family or a rural community by means of a federal welfare program or an enormous dam, the law of unintended consequences prevails...
...Australia's most notorious environmentalist. During the seven-year battle to save the river, he was robbed, shot at and set upon by thugs. The mailbox of his spartan weatherboard cottage was stuffed with animal entrails. But his soft-spoken message of peace and planetary conservation prevailed, and the dam was scuttled in 1983. Briefly jailed for barring the path of a bulldozer, Brown was elected to the Tasmanian parliament the day after his release -- one of five "green" M.P.s who hold the balance of power in Australia's smallest state. Today he speaks out regularly on such issues...
When Janos Vargha took a job at the scientific journal Buvar in Budapest, one of his first assignments was to study a dam being built on the Danube near the Hungarian village of Nagymaros. Vargha's article, critical of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian project in those pre-glasnost days, was spiked. "That was my first experience with censorship," he says...
...last. To find out why his article was killed, Vargha began a more thorough investigation. He immersed himself in subjects such as irrigation and geology and was named to a commission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to assess the dam's impact. One area at risk: the Danube Bend, a graceful curve of the river near the historic residence of Hungarian kings. Though the government banned public debate on the project, Vargha persisted. He helped publish a newsletter about the dam and circulated a petition against it that drew 10,000 signatures -- an action that, at the time...
...tide of history was turning his way. The Nagymaros dam became a focal point for the budding political opposition, and when the government began loosening its policies, he published his original article -- in a much tougher version. Public protests against the dam intensified, and last year Hungary finally terminated the project. Vargha, meanwhile, has emerged as a powerful voice of political reform. A founder of the Alliance of Free Democrats, now the leading opposition party, he was offered an official post within the group. But Vargha, 40, declined. Says he: "I am first and foremost an environmentalist...