h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

High Rod, I enjoyed this article. A question: were the protests about how high the water level would go about land inundation - were there perhaps people who had to be relocated? Over here a problem with dams is that there are rare species of plants whose habitat get flooded. For instance one dam here caused flooding of the habitat of a rare cycad. They ended up removing thousands of cycads and shipping them elsewhere or giving them to collectors and botanic gardens. This later caused a problem because the particular cycad was assigned to a certain species and later turned out to be a different species - over here cycad species are extremely local: one species can grow on one hill, and only on that hill, and on a different hill not far away, it's an entirely different species. So now many people and gardens have cycads labelled as a certain species that is actually something else.

Also they're planning more dams over here; I went to the site of one dam for instance to make a survey of rare plant species. Over here there is almost no patch of land that will not have some rare plant species on it.

Yes, Willem, it would be land inundation and forced relocation - that's as I understand it, being new here.

In at least one case, Cromwell/Clyde, (Part 5, next) it was largely the devastation of potential future economics.

So far as plant- and wild-life is concerned, I can't comment on attitudes of the times, in my present state of knowledge.
The whole country was home (up until most of the first millenium) to pretty much all unique species before the arrival of man - Polynesians (Maori-to-be) started it and Euros continued (that's what we humans are - marauders par 'excellence').

Just one case in point: Brits introduced rabbits (for food) and when (surprise, surprise) they became a nuisance ... introduced ferrets, weasels ... so that nowadays conservation is, well, important.