dams
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A paddler travels one of India’s great rivers before a dam changes it for good
Except for the occasional palm or banana tree, the Himalayan canyon walls look like those carved by the Salmon River in Idaho: The hillsides are brown and dotted with pine groves, and the boulder-strewn banks of the river give way to stretches of white sand. But this is the Bhagirathi River, half a world away […]
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Hubris on the Yangtze
555 — height, in feet, of the Washington Monument, the tallest structure in Washington, D.C. 575 — height, in feet, of the new Three Gorges Dam in China (which is also wider than 100 Washington Monuments standing edge to edge) 4.3 million — cubic meters of concrete needed to build the Panama Canal 26.4 million […]
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The Endesa Nigh
Indigenous Activists Give Up Fight Over Chilean Dam After a six-year protest, four elderly Pehuenche women have agreed to end their opposition to a $570 million hydroelectric dam to be built on their ancestral land in Southern Chile. After lengthy negotiations with the Chilean government and Endesa, the Spanish-owned power company building the dam, the […]
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Pedro Arrojo-Agudo has started a new water culture in the Old World
Economics professor Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, who teaches at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, is using his academic expertise to battle a monster: the National Hydrological Plan, a $25 billion project that would build 120 dams on the Ebro River. The dams would submerge entire towns along Spain’s second-longest river, displace tens of thousands of rice […]
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Michelle Nijhuis reviews Power Politics by Arundhati Roy
When your first novel wins the Booker Prize, sells 6 million copies, and earns you a publicity trip around the world, what do you do next? Arundhati Roy, author of the 1997 novel The God of Small Things, decided she wanted to switch from fiction to the hard facts. A year after Roy’s big debut, […]
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Trouble Right Here in River City
5,270 large dams blocked rivers in 1950 36,500 large dams block rivers today 17 percent of U.S. rivers are currently dammed 600,000 miles of rivers in the U.S. have been impounded behind dams 235,000 miles of rivers in the U.S. have been channelized 25,000 miles of rivers in the U.S. have been dredged for navigation […]
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Dammed If He Does, Dammed If He Doesn't
Last Wednesday’s New York Times featured a full-page ad urging Vice Pres. Al Gore to take a stronger position on dam removal on the lower Snake River in Washington state, a step that enviros believe would improve the survival chances of several salmon species that call the river home. What happens to a decision deferred? […]