The Three Gorges Dam project is currently the world’s largest construction and engineering site, and has been at the center of a substantial amount of controversy over its economic, social and ecological consequences. Located in the Hubei Province of China along the Yangtze River, this 400 mile reservoir will be able to generate 84 billion kilowatts of energy per hour. Yet the project has destroyed 11 cities and has displaced over 1.2 million people.
Chinese artist Yang Yi grew up in a small town along the Yangtze, which will be completely subsumed underwater during the dam’s final stages of construction in 2009. Yi depicts the tragic effects of the Three Gorges Dam Project in a series of haunting underwater images using photography and digital techniques. These post-apocalyptic images of underwater abandoned towns are both a reconciliation of personal loss, and a commentary on the social, cultural and economic affects of industrialization and developmental transformation in China.
and learn more about the ecological effects of the dam from the Times Online. Read what others have said about the project, and leave your own comments as well. Don’t forget to check out this UK Channel 4 coverage below, which also takes a critical look at the environmental effects of the project.
CATEGORIES: Culture, Environment
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I guess the people who want bigger don’t realize it is badder!
Dams ruin the rivers by holding back silt!
Dam it all!
Beautiful fantasy images. Of course, all the cities were destroyed before the flooding. The displaced people were relocated to new cities. The old have the hardest time of it, losing the place where they lived all their lives. The young take the move easier, enjoying the fact that their living conditions are improved. Modern dams like the Yangtze take silt into account, but they cannot do everything. The effects on local wildlie could not been totally mitigated. The loss of cultural artifacts cannot be undone.
The idea here is not a simplistic bigger for the sake of bigger. This is a devloping nation with a great need for the power to run their cities.
I toured the gorges recently. I understand a little of the nation’s needs and their pride in what they’ve accomplished, but I cannot escape pondering what has been lost. You can find my post on the Xiling Gorge here: http://betterfiction.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/30/
Yeah, we read about this in our nineth grade history class this year. Of course, the textbooks were so old the article in it was from when they were planning the whole project out, before they ran into major problems while building it. I still don’t understand why they would want to lose more land, even if they do want to generate more electricity for their big cities. They already have too many people with hardly any decent place to live in the country, so why would they want to waste good land and historical sites? I guess they can’t change what has been done. Whats done is done.