Word: floodplains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Also working in the Pantanal's favor is the inaccessibility of the central core of the huge floodplain. The enormous, uninhabited wetlands provide a refuge where animals can retreat from hunting and other human intrusions. Munn notes that the area has survived deforestation in large sections of its watershed and that the effects of industrialization in the surrounding states have so far been minimal. "If this glass is half empty," he says, surveying the wild diversity of wading birds, flycatchers and kingfishers feeding at the flooded edge of a pasture, "I can't imagine what it would look like full...
...other water is there on top of it," observes Fred Liscum, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Levees built to protect towns can also restrict river flow, which in turn can force the waterway to crest and wash out the barriers on either bank. Says Robert Cox, Louisiana floodplain administrator: "You don't get rid of the water; you just pass it on downstream to the next...
...than a concern for quality. Opponents of the Napa Valley's proposed AVAs charge that the new boundaries would exclude some of the best vineyards and that there is no historical justification for referring to any part of the valley as Oakville Bench. (In geology, a bench is the floodplain of a lake or river...
Mies, meanwhile, was taking the logic of the empty architectural box to its unnatural extreme in the U.S. His campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology is a grove of steel ectoskeletons, essentially giant one-room buildings. The Farnsworth House (1951), a planar H-beam box floating over a floodplain outside Chicago, was Mies' last modest building, and the most affectingly American one. (Alas, his project for an Indiana fast-food stand never got built.) Farnsworth looks like a house, just barely. After it came almost nothing but true Miesian "universal space": high-rises, modeled on his twin apartment slabs...
Another new Vermont law requires developers to meet a long list of environmental requirements before they can turn their first shovelful of dirt. For example, a subdivider who wants to build on a floodplain must now prove that his development will not imperil the health, safety and welfare of the public during a flood...