The lore of the South could not survive without rivers any better than the human body could survive without blood. Rivers wind through Twain’s and Faulkner’s and James Dickey’s prose; they flow out of Stephen Foster’s lyrics. Yet it is the South, more than any region except California, that has become a landscape of reservoirs, and southerners, more than anyone else, are still at the grand old work of destroying their rivers. With one hand they dam them; with the other they channelize them; the two actions cancel each other out—the channelized streams promote the floods the dams were built to
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