Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
economic damages of exceptional
oodings. Since the second half of the nineteenth
century, various specialists and practitioners, who joined in the
“
conservationist
movement
”
, in the United States as well as in other countries
—
like France
—
inquired into the relation of forest cover to stream
ow and even landslide.
c and trade, rivers often provided the
foundation for urban growth and its spatial expression. Progressively, especially
from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century,
rivers have been the subject of various plans, designed by local authorities or by
central States,
Because of their role in promoting traf
to overcome obstacles to navigation (
uctuations in river
ow
throughout the seasons, exceptional droughts and
oods, sandbars, rapids, etc.).
Because canals came to be seen as the ideal means of transporting goods, rivers
were increasingly engineered, e.g. standardized in width and depth, to resemble
these arti
cial waterways. At that time, canals were indeed the key means to
transport coal. As early as 1815, the Rhine Commission, an international body, was
created to oversee the river and mold it into what would amount to a commercial
canal. In the 1830s, the United States federal government began to reshape the
Mississippi river, viewed as
.
The rise of railroad sealed the decline of waterways. In the second half of the
20th century, only big channels (deep enough to allow the transit of several
thousand-ton barges and boats) remained in activity. From this time onward, some
of the smaller channels were converted into recreational boating facilities. The seas
remain the biggest waterway for shipping. They are regularly hit by environmental
catastrophes, such as the major oil slicks consecutive to the tanker spills of the
Torrey (1967), Amoco (1978) and the Exxon (1989). As early as 1969 a conference
was held in London on the subject of sea pollution by hydrocarbons. Environmental
history has perhaps a little less explored history of seas than history of inland water,
except for history of
“
nature
'
s highway to market
”
shing and marine animal populations which is still a very
eld.
19
active
4.3.2 The Dam Building: An Ambiguous Balance
Environmental historians have paid attention to the controversies surrounding some
domestic water improvement schemes, leading to dam buildings to set up reservoirs
for instance. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Hetch Hetchy Valley project,
to furnish water to San Francisco was a famous case. It entailed national protests
from the preservationist movement and its prominent
gures, like John Muir. A
more positive aspect in the same Bay Area region was that thanks to their land
reserves around the springs and pumpings, some water districts and companies
19
Danish environmental historians are very engaged in Marine Environmental History and
belong to various transdisciplinary networks, such as the International Council for the Exploration
of the Sea.
