Word: dam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What we're just beginning to understand is how water development has, like nuclear energy, amounted to a Faustian bargain between civilization and the natural world--which, as it happens, supports civilization. Hydroelectricity from Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State smelted enough aluminum during World War II to build tens of thousands of warplanes, with enough surplus power to make plutonium for the first atom bombs. But now, in the form of devastated salmon fisheries, Grand Coulee (along with countless other dams) is extracting an awful price for its creation...
From California to Maine, dam removal has begun. When four small diversion dams were taken off a Sierra Nevada stream called Butte Creek, record numbers of spring-run Chinook salmon--listed by the U.S. as a threatened species--rushed past their ruins to spawn. If the spring-run Chinook ends up on the more serious endangered-species list, that will trigger more restrictions on diversions from its spawning rivers. So helping the spring-run by getting rid of a few dams could be worth billions to California's economy, which is hopelessly dependent on the manipulation of water...
Unfortunately, no simple solution is politically simple. There's usually fierce resistance from local stakeholders to any proposal to remove a dam, no matter how small. But it's striking how, in just two or three decades, the U.S. has gone from building dams to not building dams to taking some of them down. Under serious discussion is the demolition of four brutish structures on the lower Snake River that have macerated millions of young fish...
...John Muir saw wilderness as something quasi-spiritual, where "tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people" could find renewal. As a nature writer and the Sierra Club's founding president, he argued eloquently for preservation, as when he battled to save Yosemite's beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley--you might "as well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches," he fumed. Muir lost, yet his words still echo with each new threat to wild places...
...planner's dream: dams to harness central India's Narmada River. But Medha Patkar, a young, largely self-taught activist, was appalled by the price: huge amounts of land swamped, half a million villagers displaced and a lush river basin ruined. Leading hunger strikes, enduring beatings and vowing to drown herself in a flooded area, she got the World Bank to withdraw support of the key Sardar Sarovar dam and scared off investors from a second major dam. But the Indian government persists with the project, and Patkar fights...