Cracked
The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World
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Narrated by:
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Steven Hawley
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Danny Campbell
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By:
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Steven Hawley
About this listen
The ugly truth about dams is about to be revealed.
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.
The estimated 800,000 dams in the world can’t be blamed for destroying the earth’s entire biological inheritance, but they play an outsized role in that destruction. Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World is a kind of speed date with the history of water control—its dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics and power that evolved with them. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world—growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos—is well beyond the benefits furnished. Success stories from Patagonia and the Blue Heart of Europe point to a possible future where rivers run free and the earth restores itself.
* This audiobook edition contains a downloadable PDF that includes definitions and illustrations from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 Steven Hawley (P)2023 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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Water in Plain Sight
- Hope for a Thirsty World
- By: Judith D. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
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Crucial solutions
- By Shane Emanuelle on 07-25-19
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 27 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
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Jared Diamond Downs You in Explanation
- By Rob on 07-20-18
By: Jared Diamond
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The Swamp
- The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
- By: Michael Grunwald
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.
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This is not Jiminy Cricket's river
- By Robert R. on 09-02-18
By: Michael Grunwald
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Apocalypse Never
- Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
- By: Michael Shellenberger
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed "billions of people are going to die", contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.
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Environmentalist with integrity!
- By Wayne on 07-01-20
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Disasterology
- Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis
- By: Samantha Montano
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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With temperatures rising and the risk of disasters growing, our world is increasingly vulnerable. Most people see disasters as freak, natural events that are unpredictable and unpreventable. But that simply isn’t the case - disasters are avoidable, but when they do strike, there are strategic ways to manage the fallout.
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We’re in trouble
- By D. Birnbaum-Lowey on 11-06-24
By: Samantha Montano
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Drinking Water
- A History
- By: James Salzman
- Narrated by: Lee Hahn
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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When you turn on the tap or twist the cap, you might not give a second thought to where your drinking water comes from. But how it gets from the ground to your glass is far more complex than you might think. Is it safe to drink tap water? Should you feel guilty buying bottled water? Is your water vulnerable to terrorist attacks? With springs running dry and reservoirs emptying, where is your water going to come from in the future? In Drinking Water, Duke professor James Salzman shows how drinking water highlights the most pressing issues of our time.
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Hard not to be affected by this book
- By Neuron on 11-16-13
By: James Salzman
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The Boom
- How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
- By: Russell Gold
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Russell Gold, a brilliant and dogged investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, has spent more than a decade reporting on one of the biggest stories of our time: the spectacular, world-changing rise of "fracking". Recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Gerald Loeb Award for his work, Gold has traveled along the pipelines and into the hubs of this country’s energy infrastructure; he has visited frack sites from Texas to North Dakota; and he has conducted thousands of interviews with engineers and wildcatters, CEOs and roughnecks, environmentalists and politicians.
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Somehow the author manages to stay balanced
- By Emily C on 05-28-14
By: Russell Gold
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Land
- How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Land - whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city - is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing - and have done - with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.
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Audiobook Version is the Best!
- By semarla on 01-31-21
By: Simon Winchester
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Trees in Paradise
- A California History
- By: Jared Farmer
- Narrated by: Kevin Scollin
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities.
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lovely audiobook
- By Michael M. on 08-02-22
By: Jared Farmer
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The Nature of Nature
- Why We Need the Wild
- By: Enric Sala
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.
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Amazing
- By Lars Pardo on 11-21-24
By: Enric Sala
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Green Metropolis
- What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability
- By: David Owen
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New York City.
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A stupid and dangerously short sighted view
- By Gare&Sophia on 11-13-12
By: David Owen
What listeners say about Cracked
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Shawn Stone
- 09-06-24
Prescient
What about the issue of invasive fish being released by dam removal? Otherwise this was great!
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