Word: lagoons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crumbling. Worst of all, the entire city is gradually sinking into the Adriatic Sea. Can Venice be saved? For 27 months, the Italian Parliament debated, squabbled and compromised. But now, finally, it has taken firm action, passing a law that states: "The safeguarding of Venice and of its lagoon is declared to be a problem of pre-eminent national interest...
What held up the legislation for so long is the complexities rising from the fact that Venice is not one but three different cities. There is the historic town built on 118 alluvial islands in a lagoon, plus two other communities on the mainland: the bleak, modern residential suburb of Mestre, which the daily Corriere della Sera calls a "delirium of concrete," and the huge, fume-filled industrial port of Marghera. Any action to help Venice often turns out to harm her ugly sisters. For example, Venice is sinking in part because the pumping of fresh water from artesian wells...
Looking at an Asian religious festival, or at the eyes of a peasant planting rice in a lagoon shows the futility of explaining Asian society with Western ideas. What does "medical care" mean to people who believe in reincarnation and bodily deprivation? What does "industry" mean to people who still spin thread by hand? Western observers nevertheless continue to foist their models on Asian society. More tragically, they attempt to make the society conform to their models...
...addicts and a host of other categories. Consider such esoterica as a journey to Dracula's lands in Rumania for those fascinated by the supernatural or the upcoming Pacific excursion led by California scientists that will track and observe schools of whales in Baja California's Scammons Lagoon...
Environmentalists are being offered an assortment of offbeat tours. Among the possibilities is a trip to Micronesia that includes scuba diving in the giant Truk Lagoon, which is littered with the hulks of Japanese warships sunk in World War II. Other groups will visit the headwaters of the Amazon, the Ruwenzori (Mountains of the Moon) Range between Uganda and the Republic of Zaire, the New Zealand and New Guinea highlands and Australia's Great Barrier Reef...