Summary for Wednesday March 24th

Topic 1: Beer requires lots of water- mostly to grow the barley and hops. We looked at a region of the US where much of this barley is grown (The Snake River Valley of Southern Idaho) and the effects that of the massive withdraws from the Snake River for irrigation in a part of the world that does not receive much rainfall.

Topic 2: Water diversion: the Quabbin Reservoir in Central and Western Massachusetts- we took a look at the "drowning" of the towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich though the eyes of Jane Yolen who was looking though the eyes of a young girl growing up in the Swift River Valley. Our look at the controversy surrounding the Quabbin was admittedly very one-sided with a rather unabashed vilification of Boston and its residents. The other side to this story, of course, is that the Boston Metropolitan area has an excellent water source that serves 2.4 million people and that a relatively small number of people had to be removed from portions of the Swift River Valley in order for this to happen.

Our look at the four villages and hundreds of people displaced by the Quabbin should also be be considered in the context of the 1,200 villages and 1.3 to 5.3 million people that will have been "resettled" for the Three Gorges Dam in China by 2020...

There is no reading for Friday (take the opportunity to read or reread sections of BlueC or BottleM).

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.