Damming Pollution

When you can't see the 40th floor of a high rise in Beijing, you know that pollution is really bad.  We suffered through a coughing bout, sour throats, and lost voices for the first couple of days in China.  How the Chinese people do not rebel against it is beyond me (according to someone I asked "They haven't really noticed yet.").  At least they haven't noticed the health effects, because the visual effects are stunning.  It is like a flashback in reverse.  Normally memories are fuzzy and hazy when they are shown in flashbacks in movies, but any 20 year old would remember vivid scenes of the beautiful nature but today only see their hazy, blurry counterparts.  I hope that China will transition to cleaner energy quicker than the United States is. 

The Three Gorges Dam was a massive undertaking to dam the Yangste river.  We saw the dam that is capable of supplying 15% of ALL OF CHINA'S energy needs.  The biggest dam in the world.  It unfortunately displaced 1.3 million people and destroyed the natural beauty of the Three Gorges by flooding most of them.  I guess when it comes to pollution, there are always two sides of the coin. Wealth or clean air.  Clean energy or millions of people moved.

One extremely peculiar part of the our dam visit was a visit to the dam memorial.  No, no one died making the dam that I know of.  The dam memorial was to memorialize just the construction of the dam. Complete with a modern art display of the construction workers and a graveyard-like area that is home to abandoned concrete triangles and building pieces that is flooded continually with fake fog to enhance its mysterious allure.

Now, in case you were very disappointed at the dam because your pictures suffered the ill effects of pollution and you were also feeling like you had just too much money at your disposal you could get a crack team of Photoshoppers to take your picture at the dam and they will put your beautiful face in front of a picture of the dam on the one clear day that there once was :)