China’s Three Gorges: As Environmental Catastrophe Looms, Beauty Lingers

Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 10.15.07 | 10:17 AM ET

We’ve been reading for some time that China is choking on epic pollution produced by its push for fast growth. One of the victims, of course, is the Three Gorges, the once-beautiful, mist-filled river passage through tall limestone and sandstone crags. Since 2003, China has dammed the Yangtze, the country’s largest river, to create a reservoir that is expected to fill by 2009. The dam is expected to produce 20 times as much electricity as the Hoover Dam and reduce China’s reliance on polluting coal—hopefully reducing the smog that regularly blots out the sun. Already more than 1,000 towns and villages are underwater, and an iconic landscape has changed. But it’s still a beautiful place of rain-slicked trees and bamboo bushes and slender waterfalls churning into a jade-colored river, writes Mary Beth Sheridan in The Washington Post.

The government is relocating almost 1.3 million people from the area; The New York Times reported that an additional 3 to 4 million people will be moved. Sheridan’s Chinese guides shrugged off the human cost, saying only the elderly objected. Younger residents, they said, were happy to be part of China’s boom and enjoyed the big, government-built houses they were getting.

As one guide told Sheridan: “They have a new future—and a new TV.”

The TV will be a handy distraction if the dam results in environmental catastrophe, as the Chinese government admits it may.

I wonder: Is Waterworld as popular on late-night TV in China as it is in Greece?

Photo by Praziquantel, via Flickr (Creative Commons.