Word: southwester
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...chose the French system over a German competitor for a 600-mile high-speed route linking Dallas with Houston and San Antonio -- a contract worth $5.8 billion on completion in 1998. In the past few years, additional TGV lines have been built toward Rennes in Brittany, Bordeaux in the southwest and Le Mans in the northwest; by 2010 the government will invest an additional $34 billion to add high-speed lines to places like Lille and Strasbourg...
...into streams, trickling and then plunging downward. In the peaks of eastern Utah, where the Green River hurtles south from Wyoming to meet the Upper Colorado, the water starts getting serious. It wants to reach sea level -- in this case the Gulf of California, some thousand miles to the southwest -- and nothing natural has ever managed to stand in its way. In its slashing, headlong rush, the Colorado gouged out a pretty impressive piece of sculpture known as the Grand Canyon. The river has been running in this rut for 5 million or 6 million years...
...good shape," says Norris Hundley Jr., a historian at UCLA. "It essentially exists in a straitjacket." Last April the Arizona stretch of the Colorado was named "the most endangered river of 1991" by American Rivers, a Washington-based conservation group. A prolonged drought in the U.S. Southwest, now in its fifth year, has dealt the Colorado a double whammy. Less snow to melt at its sources means less water coursing downriver; reduced rainfall elsewhere means even greater demands on the diminished flow...
CITIES. Like the rest of the nation, the Southwest has been growing increasingly urban. What were only recently one-horse outposts now exfoliate for miles into the blazing environs, their citizens housed in air-conditioned comfort and assuming plentiful water as a God-given right. Among the seven states served by the Colorado River, California has become the 800-lb. gorilla at all negotiations, its cities expanding, their thirst apparently unquenchable. The Old West here comes into direct conflict with the New: the leathery rancher in Wyoming with his herd to water vs. the condo-dwelling Sybarite in Laguna Beach...
...habit of looking at geography from a European point of view would cease. "The Far East" and "the Middle East" would disappear, replaced by "East Asia" and "Southwest Asia and North Africa...