Word: dikes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...life full circle. Starting in 1972, when she was a 30-year-old peasant living on a commune, Hu spent years hauling sacks of earth to reclaim land as Chairman Mao had ordered. A pumping station worked day and night to lift water from her fields over a dike and into Dongting Lake. But the dike ruptured in 1996 and swept away Hu's earthen house. Her family rebuilt it in brick, which they thought would withstand anything. Then the flood that hit two years later took half of the house away again. "I dreamed of moving higher...
...finally at peace. The government paid $2,000 to her family to dismantle what was left of their home and rebuild it a few hundred meters away?beyond where the water could reach. The authorities then shut the pumping station and left the dike to rot. The wetland she had once labored to destroy has returned to water; where her old house once stood, her son has floated a huge cage to raise fish. Migratory birds, such as rare swans and spoonbills, have returned to the area. WWF lent Hu enough money to buy a sow, which will give birth...
WILDLIFE BE DAMMED In nearby Isahaya, a controversial seawall has conservationists angry. A government-sponsored land reclamation project is responsible for the dike that seals off a portion of Isahaya Bay; when fully dried out, it will be sold as farmland. Environmentalists and some fishermen say the project is already responsible for the extinction of 55 species of animal and marine life. The government says the seawall is necessary for flood control. Both sides are probably right. At any rate, the six-kilometer-long dam is an impressive sight...
...eventually, plugging holes in the dike comes to seem more trouble than it's worth. So now I'm out. The next phase will be interesting as well. Call it part two in a controlled experiment testing those fancy French theories about disease as a social construct. I was officially, publicly healthy. Now, with almost no objective medical change, I am officially, publicly sick. How will that change the actual effect of the disease? Without, I hope, distorting the experiment, I predict that this notion of disease as a function of attitudes about disease will turn out to be more...
...live. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Right now, all NBC has to worry about undermining its tape-delayed coverage is Canadian TV and print stories on the Internet. These are only cracks in a technological dike that's bound to burst open: Future viewers will have more satellite and broadband options, and the network is foolish, in the Napster era, to think it can forever keep people from accessing the live content they want...