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

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

imageWe’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?

Related on World Hum:
* The Critics: ‘China Road’
* Best Travel Books of All-Time: “River Town” by Peter Hessler

Photo by Praziquantel, via Flickr (Creative Commons.

Tags: Eco Travel, Asia, China, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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

Joseph 10.15.07 | 11:17 PM ET

EVERYTHING IN CHINA ROCKS!!!!!!

THE YANGTZE RIVER IS A GREAT PLACE TO CHECK OUT.

Howard Wong, AIA 10.16.07 | 6:25 AM ET

Time will tell.  Mother Nature is too wily to truly alter.  There’s the Yin & Yan of benefits versus the suppression of the natural replenishing of the earth.
Moreover, much more wisdom is needed to resurrect the rich village/family/economic/cultural interrelationships, which evolved over centuries.  Big tenement housing hasn’t been the best legacy of the West; And most certainly is counter-intuitive to a healthy Chinese familial structure.

Arlene Garcia 10.23.07 | 6:47 PM ET

I’m just sorry for all the archelogical
sites that were lost because of the dam.

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