Word: dam
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last year, when a group of journalists and historians offered a list of the 100 biggest news stories of the 20th century, the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was ranked 58th. Completion of Hoover Dam didn't make the cut. You sort of expect this from celebrity-infatuated mass culture: when it comes to fundamental achievements that make contemporary civilization work, a stifled yawn. Water, dams, aqueducts, irrigation, hydroelectricity--how borrrrrrring! Really? Los Angeles, world headquarters of celebrity culture, has measured as little as 5 in. (13 cm) of rainfall in a year. And despite occasional monsoons, Southern...
...would think the creation of modern Los Angeles, which is what Hoover Dam allowed, would make that structure newsworthy. Actually, its historic significance is of more cosmic proportions. The first of the world's great dams, Hoover inaugurated an Age of Dams, which has spanned the past three-quarters of a century. The dam-building mentality has pretty much expired in the U.S.--one reason is, we've run out of dam sites--but it's still prevalent throughout much of the world. In China, which is erecting the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest (and, at $25 billion, the most...
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...