Hoover Dam afterthoughts.

In the November of 2004 I was spending my vacation time in the wonderful Utah canyons and as I was finishing my trip I have passes marvel of engineering: The Hoover Dam. Being engineer myself I always fascinated by such titanic human endeavors but unexpectedly my admiration turned into kind of depression. Here is why: during Hoover Dam tour I came into old exhibit building and there it began.

Old Exhibit building displays a huge relief map of Colorado and Green river basin area that is affected by Hover Dam and other smaller ones. The exposition is accompanied by narration about greatness of the effect. Damn! It is very impressive. I was so moved and buried in thoughts that I even forgot to make a picture of it. On the picture below I try to show the affected area.

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My thoughts were mixture of admiration with almost horror of visualization of human impact on planet Earth. The project altered nature thousands and thousands of square miles west of Rocky Mountains.

Well, It was not enough. Then I boarded plane to fly back to Kansas City. It made connection in Columbus OH and as I was looking at aerial view of land below its similarity to Daniel Quinn’s poster struck me. Farmland below looked exactly as desert on Daniel's poster: no trees, fences, and every 30 -50 miles smoking electric plants, which burn non renewable coal to provide heat to the very energy inefficient houses. Very depressing llandscape...

We humans waste so much of non-renewable resources that it is simply mind-boggling!

Then I recalled my constant irritation caused by lousy fuel efficiency of my rented Jeep Cherokee (15 MPG), damn! Forget Hummer-H2, they are negligible minority – majority of cars on streets waste non-renewable energy resource and deprive our own children from potential benefits of oil with amazing speed.

I think it should be declared illegal worldwide for a private car to have fuel efficiency lower than 45MPG. Check out http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml there are cars available with efficiency around 60 MPG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!