Word: salween
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...they make up a loose network opposed to what they consider the devastation of natural resources in a part of the country where snowmelt from the Himalayas irrigates rivers throughout China and Southeast Asia. Already the network has helped delay approval of two impoundments on the upper Yangtze and Salween rivers. Yet in taking on state-run companies and political interests, the environmentalists face daunting odds. Says activist Xue Ye of the Beijing-based Friends of Nature: "We are weak, but we have a chance...
...affected by dams as little more than obstacles to a bigger goal--powering the world's most eye-popping economy. Beijing's planners want hydropower to help ease their reliance on imported oil. Especially enticing is a swath of Yunnan province where three of Asia's great rivers--the Salween, Mekong and Yangtze--descend through valleys that account for nearly a quarter of China's hydropower potential. Developers have proposed 27 dams on those three rivers...
Last summer Yu chartered a bus and drove peasants from a proposed dam area along the upper Salween to visit a 10-year-old dam a few hours away. The government had celebrated the Manwan Dam as a model of development for its cheap electricity and successful relocation of 3,500 people. The visitors saw something different: peasant women picking through the hydropower station's garbage dump for plastic bottles to recycle for pennies. Sobbing, the women explained that they had not found jobs after losing their land. The scene was captured in an underground documentary that environmentalists have passed...
...from Ethiopia and get all the way to China. Six hundred years later, the Mediterranean was literally the center of the world, and the island now called Sri Lanka occupied the eastern half of the Red Sea. In the 1660s, the Mekong River, along with the Yangtze and the Salween, dangled like scraggly chin hairs from a Tibetan lake roughly the size of Taiwan. Or so it appeared on the most accurate European map from each of these eras...
...protect China's natural wonders or destroy the places that visitors are bused in to admire? Northwest Yunnan, which has made its first forays into ecotourism, is a perfect place to find out. Through it run branches of four of Asia's major rivers?the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy. Between their banks soar some of the fastest-growing mountain ranges on earth, which in turn harbor the world's most biologically diverse temperate forests. Since 1998, when a large-scale ban on commercial logging axed 80% of Yunnan's income, its local governments have latched onto...