四级201510套真题5套模拟第五套.pptVIP

The thousands of people forced to abandon their homes in recent weeks to floodwaters are victims not just of nature but of human error as well. Years of mismanagement of the vast Mississippi River ecosystem --- the continuous and often inadvisable construction of levees (堤坝) and navigation (导航) channels, the paving over of wetlands, the commercial development of flood plains --- have made the damage worse than it might otherwise have been. The Obama administration is now completing an inspection of the guidelines governing dams, levees and other water-related projects built with federal money. Historically, projects had been shaped by two main factors: the Army Corps of Engineers’ conviction that nature can be subdued by levees and dams, and its reflexive green-lighting of any flood control project that encouraged commercial or agricultural development. The new rules, Congress said, should require the Corps and other federal agencies to give equal weight to less easily measurable benefits like wildlife habitat and to “nonstructural” solutions to flood control like preserving wetlands, flood plains and other “natural systems.” To give the Corps its due, it has performed nobly in the present emergency. Its main-stem levees have held. Its decision to blow holes in levees guarding the New Madrid floodway in Missouri clearly saved Cairo, Illinois, and other places downstream. These methods had long been part of Corps emergency plans, and they worked. The question the environmental community and many in Congress are asking is whether this would have been necessary if the river had been better managed. In populated areas, some levees were built solely to attract more development, while others closed off flood plains that could have acted as a natural safety valve. Meanwhile, over the years, the upper Mississippi watershed has lost millions of acres of wetlands that could have served as a natural sponge for floodwaters. So-called 100-year floods