The bad news: On 10 November, the South Korean government broke ground on its massive Four Rivers Project, which could result in more than a dozen new dams and a wholesale reshaping of four major waterways that conservationists consider an ecological disaster.
The center, a new central control unit, is studded with computers flashing real-time data about water levels, wind strength and other potential threats to levees built to hold in check the North Sea, the Rhine River and three other major waterways that flow through the Netherlands.
In Scandinavia there are two major commercial artificial waterways: the first, the Trollhätte Canal, connects the Götaälv (river) upward from Göteborg with Lake Vänern and with the Finnish lakes and connecting canals; the second, the Saimaa Canal, in southeast Finland, connecting the vast Saimaa Lake system to the sea, was being reconstructed at the time of World War II.
Cairo was near the point where four major strategic waterways — the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers — joined to flow southward.
Except for Hungarian, which moved westward across the steppes, the Finno-Ugric languages form two chains distributed along major waterways, with the confluence of the Kama and Volga at their centre.
The plan was to carry diluted bitumen from the tar sands, across hundreds of waterways, over two major mountain ranges and through some of the wildest country in North America.
A week before that, I was in the Himalayas and India, where we have seven Waterkeeper organizations protecting the major waterways that supply water to 40% of the planet.
About 140 miles long, the San Saba is not considered one of the state's major waterways, but it illustrates — in a state still dealing with a serious drought — the sensitivities surrounding the use of a limited resource.
Tri-Tech Holding Inc, a major Chinese company that engineers, manages and monitors municipal sewer systems, natural waterways and other water resources, has recently won two major contracts worth a combined value of over US$3.5 million.
Most of the world's major waterways have been diverted or dammed or otherwise manipulated — in the United States, only two per cent of rivers run unimpeded — and people now use half the world's readily accessible freshwater runoff.
