| dc.description.abstract | Rivers, lifeline of human life, is crucial to the human cultural development. However, factors like dam and reservoir-building, excessive groundwater pumping, shipping, and environmental and climate change confront global rivers with an unprecedented crisis. The drainage area of the Yangtze River in particular is polluted most seriously in the world, posting threats to drinking water for more than 500 cities. One may put it in this way: the giant dam radically changes the natural law, making many big rivers drying at an amazing speed.
Chinese dam is number one by its scale and number. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam is not only the Mainland China’s major public works plan, but also the economics-oriented water project that is the largest, most expensive in the world. The conventional wisdom is that the restoration project of the Yangtze River takes for a long time. Although the Three Gorges Dam is not the only one flood control work, it is the most pressing and effective. The main goal of this project is to effectively control the flood in this drainage area, replacing related pains once and for all with the benefits of generating electricity, shipping and tourism.
However, immediately after the construction in 1994, this would-be-ecological engineering has incurred many problems, such as breaking the social and natural sustainability not in favor of the equilibrium between human being and the environment and bringing about much relevant suspiciousness and controversy. This suggests that Chinese technocrats’ lacking of the ideas and capacity on the environmental ethics leads to their poor judgement of ecological environment of the reservoir region, along with failure of philosophic value technocrats should hold.
This study looks for the cause, objective, and development of the Three Gorges Dam in the literature review. Furthermore, this study analyzes the entire project to discover ethic problems and predicaments over the proof process, environment ecology and biodiversity, and then researches the project with the ecocentric ethics and Leopold’s the land ethics, into the engineering demonstration, justifiability of the engineering execution, environment ecology, biodiversity, integrality and soundness of the reservoir area. At last, this study makes environmental ethic suggestions about the restoration project of the Three Gorges Dam to China, hoping to restore the natural state of this area. | en_US |