Word: lake
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...town of Changgou, in a rural district of Beijing, "to try to save some trees." Friends in the district government had phoned with news that Changgou had announced it would bulldoze several of its constituent villages and bring in 5,000 laborers to create an enormous man-made lake as part of a program to attract real estate investment and tourism. They'd recommended that local leaders give Yu an audience and consider hiring him. "It sounds like the Great Leap Forward"?Mao's disastrous campaign to boost economic productivity in the 1950s?Yu said, as he sped toward Changgou...
...group of local leaders took Yu on a tour of their project. Chalk lines marking the lake's proposed shores ran through villages and along roads. Yu leapt out of the car to take photos of a pair of bulldozers that looked tiny against the vast swath of empty land where they were mounding up dirt. Bounding past the officials, he turned his camera on a bird's nest high up in a poplar next to the mineral spring supposed to supply the lake. "He even takes pictures of that," marveled one official when Yu was out of earshot. Driving...
...Back at the town office, the officials presented their plan. They played a DVD that showed pictures of large lakes in other places. Changgou's lake would be the center of a new resort, they told Yu. They would have windsurfing, golf and maybe skiing. The DVD played a montage of flowers opening in time-lapse followed by pictures of ripe fruit and beachside cottages. "This is our concept," one official told Yu, as the screen filled with hot-air balloons...
...When it was Yu's turn to speak, he smiled. "I think you have a very good idea," he said quietly. "But I don't think your lake needs to be quite so big. What you have here is very rare. You're one of the only places in North China with spring water. If you use it up to make a giant lake, no one will come here. Right now I'm worried you're going to spend a lot of money, but lose value. Other places have lakes. Why not do something different? You could be a model...
...changed, however, as geologists, led by Andrew Lawson of the University of California, Berkeley, raced into the field, making observations that established the existence of a fault line that parallels the California coast for more than 700 miles. They named the fault the San Andreas, after a jewel-like lake that lay within the rift zone less than 10 miles south of what was then America's largest and richest Western city...