28,000 rivers wiped off the map of China

[progressoid]

ABOUT 28,000 rivers have disappeared from China's state maps, an absence seized upon by environmentalists as evidence of the irreversible natural cost of developmental excesses.

More than half of the rivers previously thought to exist in China appear to be missing, according to the 800,000 surveyors who compiled the first national water census, leaving Beijing fumbling to explain the cause.

Only 22,909 rivers covering an area of 100sq km were located by surveyors, compared with the more than 50,000 in the 1990s, a three-year study by the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Bureau of Statistics found.

Officials blame the apparent loss on climate change, arguing that it has caused waterways to vanish, and on mistakes by earlier cartographers. But environmental experts say the disappearance of the rivers is a real and direct manifestation of headlong, ill-conceived development, where projects are often imposed without public consultation.

...

The missing rivers provoked wistful recollections among Chinese internet users. "The rivers I used to play around have disappeared; the only ones left are polluted, we can't eat the fish in them, they are all bitter," a person using the name Pippi Shuanger wrote on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/rivers-wiped-off-the-map-of-china/story-e6frg6so-1226609139591

[riverbendviewgal]

1. Mother Earth is being murdered

for profit and greed.

[pscot]

2. Those wacky environmentalists

Always see the glass as half empty. Or in this case, completely empty. But what better place for a new highway, than an abandoned streambed.

[Witan00]

4. True!

As they say, "always look on the bright side of death"

[Javaman]

5. Right you are! that's turing rotten lemons into...

into...um...something else.

[lonestarnot]

3. Water. The next war.

[stuntcat]

6. +1,000,000,000oooetcetc

a war without end too, like all the finite resources will cause.