作者:
Marc Reisner 出版社: Penguin Books 副标题: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition 出版年: 1993-1-1 页数: 608 定价: USD 18.00 装帧: Paperback ISBN: 9780140178241
Newly updated, this timely history of the struggle to discover and control water in the American West is a tale of rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion-dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disaster. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In that year --1902-- the United States government launched its own irrigation program, based on Mormon experience, guided by Mormon laws, run largely by Mormons. (Bureau of Reclamation) (查看原文)
Only one desert civilization, out of dozens that grew up in antiquity, has survived uninterrupted into modern times. And Egypt's approach to irrigation was fundamentally different from all the rest. (查看原文)
These environmental and financial issues (of WaterFix) are disturbing enough, but perhaps worse would be the repercussions of this massive infrastructure spending on urban conservation, recycling, and local water supply.
2018-08-12 15:51
These environmental and financial issues (of WaterFix) are disturbing enough, but perhaps worse would be the repercussions of this massive infrastructure spending on urban conservation, recycling, and local water supply.引自 Postscript to the Revised Edition
But the Bureau still sells them (farmers) water so cheaply that they can't aford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. By the seventies, however, America's values were utterly different, because everyone's experiences had changed.
2018-08-12 15:45
But the Bureau still sells them (farmers) water so cheaply that they can't aford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. 引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep ItThe West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep ItBy the seventies, however, America's values were utterly different, because everyone's experiences had changed.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep It
It isn't easy to get people to think along these lines (of water scarcity), at least not yet, because of vunerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.
2018-08-08 08:59
It isn't easy to get people to think along these lines (of water scarcity), at least not yet, because of vunerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep It
The one irrigated civilization of antiquity that remained intact for thousands of years was Egypt, and we are now reasonably certain why. Every year, the Nile, the world's most reliable river, would engorge itself in a spring flood and cover most of Egypt's agricultural land. The floods would both carry off the salts and deposit a fresh layer of silt. The farmers would then rush to plant their ...
2018-07-23 14:36
The one irrigated civilization of antiquity that remained intact for thousands of years was Egypt, and we are now reasonably certain why. Every year, the Nile, the world's most reliable river, would engorge itself in a spring flood and cover most of Egypt's agricultural land. The floods would both carry off the salts and deposit a fresh layer of silt. The farmers would then rush to plant their corps, which grew lavishly on the residual moisture and the perfect soil. 引自 Things Fall ApartIn the 1960s, however, the Egyptians, pumped up with a sense of grandiose destiny by Gamal Abdel Nasser, decided to build a high dam on the Nile at Aswan. The Soviet Union helped them to do it against the United States' advice. The result has been described as the worse ecological mistake committed in one place by mankind. The spring floods are gone; the nutrient-rich silts no longer come; the Nile sardine fishery in the Mediterranean is going extinct; bilharzia, or schistosomiasis, a gruesome disease borne by a snail that thrives in slack waters in Africa, is rampant; the reservoir is silting up quite rapidly due to erosion from primitive agriculture upriver; irrigation canals, meanwhile, are being scoured by the silt-free water released by the dam; and the salts have arrived. With their copious new supply of year-round irrigation water, the Egyptian farmers have been irrigating madly, and the water table, increasingly poisoned by salts, is rising dangerously.... The Egyptians now have no choice other than to install drainage, which they can ill afford --partly because schistosomiasis has become a national epidemic costing them some $600 million a year. 引自 Things Fall Apart
Mormons started the first irrigation system in the West. In that year --1902-- the United States government launched its own irrigation program, based on Mormon experience, guided by Mormon laws, run largely by Mormons. (Bureau of Reclamation) Only one desert civilization, out of dozens that grew up in antiquity, has survived uninterrupted into modern times. And Egypt's approach to irrigation w...
2018-07-16 23:13
Mormons started the first irrigation system in the West.
In that year --1902-- the United States government launched its own irrigation program, based on Mormon experience, guided by Mormon laws, run largely by Mormons. (Bureau of Reclamation)引自 Introduction - A Semi Desert HeartOnly one desert civilization, out of dozens that grew up in antiquity, has survived uninterrupted into modern times. And Egypt's approach to irrigation was fundamentally different from all the rest.引自 Introduction - A Semi Desert Heart
... despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have manged to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green --and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groudwater. But a goal of many westerners and their federal archangels, the Burreau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has...
2018-07-17 12:15
... despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have manged to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green --and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groudwater. But a goal of many westerners and their federal archangels, the Burreau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers, has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. What they seem not to understand is how difficult it will be to just to hang on to the beachhead they have made. Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert. But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilazations throughout history -- Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Azrec, the Hohokam -- before they collapsed.引自 Introduction
Today, the Central Valley Project is still the most mind-boggling public works project on five continents, and in the 1960s the state built its own project, nearly as large. Together, the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project have captured enough water to supply eight cities the size of New York. But the projects brought into production far more land than they had water to sup...
2018-07-19 03:12
Today, the Central Valley Project is still the most mind-boggling public works project on five continents, and in the 1960s the state built its own project, nearly as large. Together, the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project have captured enough water to supply eight cities the size of New York. But the projects brought into production far more land than they had water to supply, so the growers had to supplement their surface water with tens of thousands of wells. As a result, the groundwater overdraft, instead of being alleviated, has gotten worse.引自 Introduction
In southern Louisiana, water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the West, lack of water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the East, "waste" water is to consume it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume--to let it flow unimpeded and ...
2018-07-19 03:30
In southern Louisiana, water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the West, lack of water is the central fact of existence, and a whole culture and set of values have grown up around it. In the East, "waste" water is to consume it needlessly or excessively. In the West, to waste water is not to consume--to let it flow unimpeded and undiverted down rivers. Use of water is, by definition, "beneficial" use -- the term is right in the law--even if it goes to Fountain Hills, Arizona, and is shot five hundred feet into 115-degree-Fahreiheit skies; even if it is sold, at vastly subsidized rates, to farmers irritating corps I'm the desert which their counterparts in Mississippi or Arkansas are, at that very moment, being paid not to grow. To easterners, "conservation" of water usually means protecting rivers from development; in the West, it means building dams.引自 Introduction
These environmental and financial issues (of WaterFix) are disturbing enough, but perhaps worse would be the repercussions of this massive infrastructure spending on urban conservation, recycling, and local water supply.
2018-08-12 15:51
These environmental and financial issues (of WaterFix) are disturbing enough, but perhaps worse would be the repercussions of this massive infrastructure spending on urban conservation, recycling, and local water supply.引自 Postscript to the Revised Edition
But the Bureau still sells them (farmers) water so cheaply that they can't aford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. The West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. By the seventies, however, America's values were utterly different, because everyone's experiences had changed.
2018-08-12 15:45
But the Bureau still sells them (farmers) water so cheaply that they can't aford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more. 引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep ItThe West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep ItBy the seventies, however, America's values were utterly different, because everyone's experiences had changed.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep It
It isn't easy to get people to think along these lines (of water scarcity), at least not yet, because of vunerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.
2018-08-08 08:59
It isn't easy to get people to think along these lines (of water scarcity), at least not yet, because of vunerable aspect of our desert empire remains for most people, even most westerners, an abstraction, like the certainty of another giant earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.引自 A Civilization, If You Can Keep It
The one irrigated civilization of antiquity that remained intact for thousands of years was Egypt, and we are now reasonably certain why. Every year, the Nile, the world's most reliable river, would engorge itself in a spring flood and cover most of Egypt's agricultural land. The floods would both carry off the salts and deposit a fresh layer of silt. The farmers would then rush to plant their ...
2018-07-23 14:36
The one irrigated civilization of antiquity that remained intact for thousands of years was Egypt, and we are now reasonably certain why. Every year, the Nile, the world's most reliable river, would engorge itself in a spring flood and cover most of Egypt's agricultural land. The floods would both carry off the salts and deposit a fresh layer of silt. The farmers would then rush to plant their corps, which grew lavishly on the residual moisture and the perfect soil. 引自 Things Fall ApartIn the 1960s, however, the Egyptians, pumped up with a sense of grandiose destiny by Gamal Abdel Nasser, decided to build a high dam on the Nile at Aswan. The Soviet Union helped them to do it against the United States' advice. The result has been described as the worse ecological mistake committed in one place by mankind. The spring floods are gone; the nutrient-rich silts no longer come; the Nile sardine fishery in the Mediterranean is going extinct; bilharzia, or schistosomiasis, a gruesome disease borne by a snail that thrives in slack waters in Africa, is rampant; the reservoir is silting up quite rapidly due to erosion from primitive agriculture upriver; irrigation canals, meanwhile, are being scoured by the silt-free water released by the dam; and the salts have arrived. With their copious new supply of year-round irrigation water, the Egyptian farmers have been irrigating madly, and the water table, increasingly poisoned by salts, is rising dangerously.... The Egyptians now have no choice other than to install drainage, which they can ill afford --partly because schistosomiasis has become a national epidemic costing them some $600 million a year. 引自 Things Fall Apart
These environmental and financial issues (of WaterFix) are disturbing enough, but perhaps worse would be the repercussions of this massive infrastructure spending on urban conservation, recycling, and local water supply.
0 有用 panpan 2007-12-22
这辈子读过的最伟大的书之一
0 有用 逐华照君 2013-04-05
本學期最討厭的書, 沒有之一
0 有用 Whyour 2014-12-11
The first half of the book is just awesome and appalling. But the latter chapters get a little bit too redundant and repetitious.
0 有用 Whyour 2014-12-11
The first half of the book is just awesome and appalling. But the latter chapters get a little bit too redundant and repetitious.
0 有用 逐华照君 2013-04-05
本學期最討厭的書, 沒有之一
0 有用 panpan 2007-12-22
这辈子读过的最伟大的书之一