Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden blog features a new dispatch. Paul is still in Turkey and moving east. You can read his new dispatch (blog post) entitled Mother Rivers. It features information on the effects of dam building on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers:
In Turkey, hundreds of dams big and small stopper the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the two most fabled rivers in history, the streams that moisten the Fertile Crescent. The government insists that these tons of poured concrete are essential for agricultural self-sufficiency, for irrigation, and through hydropower to help reduce the country’s dependency on foreign energy. Environmentalists and archaeologists disagree. The rivers are throttled, they say. And if the Tigris and Euphrates can be deemed the mothers of modern urban life—the nurturers of history’s first cities—then the frenzy of construction, they say, represents a form of parental abuse.
"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style."
- Maya Angelou
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