Word: damse
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Almost everyone has some appreciation of how water projects have altered the course of civilization in ways we (perhaps foolishly) call benign. Dams and reservoirs permit unimaginable numbers of people to inhabit forbiddingly arid regions--as well as floodplains where cities would be washed away without upstream protection. Sacramento, Calif...
One 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...
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...
It seems ironic that nuclear energy is widely regarded as a greater environmental threat than dams, even though fission--with the jarring exceptions of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island--has caused relatively little harm. There may be huge calamities in its future, and its fiercely toxic fission products still have...
Then, in the late 1920s, after a flood that spread the river 40 miles from its banks, the U.S. Congress made levee construction Washington's responsibility. Billions of tax dollars from elsewhere--probably tens of billions, in modern money--were spent constricting the Mississippi's channel, so its silt began...