Tuesday, June 12, 2018

The Place No One Knew - Glen Canyon on the Colorado






The Place No One Knew - Glen Canyon on the Colorado by Eliot Porter (Photographer), Daniel P Beard (Preface), and David Brower (Foreword) is an elegy to a natural wonder buried beneath water under the auspices of so-called human progress. 

Glen Canyon was dammed in order to create Lake Powell, which generates electricity, and is a holding tank, of sorts, for Lake Mead.  Lake Mead, and other places along the Colorado River, provide water to nearly 40 million people and agriculture.

This book provides photographs of the canyon before it was lost to the depths.  Now, nature appears to be laughing at both environmentalists attempts to bring back the canyon through human effort, and those in the Bureau of Land Management to continue to exploit it. through human effort  Since 1999, when Lake Powell was last full, the area has suffered severe drought.  The canyon is emerging once more regardless of human efforts.  At times the lack has been below 30% capacity.

There is a sense of poetry and justice to all this.  Nature eventually wins - if we receive benefit or harm from this, it is entirely accidental. 


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