Sunday, June 01, 2003
THREE GORGES BEGINS TO FILL
Here's a report this morning about the recent milestone reached in the Three Gorges dam project: Major filling of the reservoir has begun. For the ten years since construction began, we've been reading reports in the West about what a bad idea this project is. I'm much more open to it. Consider that so much of the press in the West is dominated by techno-pessimists, who subscribe to a world-view in which all significant technological progress -- especially any that impacts "nature" -- is viewed as hubris. How much of that reporting was written by biologists and hydrological engineers, and how much by liberal arts majors who were raised on Rachel Carson and Greenpeace leaflets? Also, one has to consider that all of the land that is being impacted has been completely sculpted by humans at every level -- from microbial to the geographic -- for thousands of years. The ecology of the Yangze basin hasn't been "natural" for a long, long time.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:25 AM
