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"Venice is sinking" is no Chicken Little squawk,
and journalist Keahey (A Sweet and Glorious Land, 2000) explains why and
what is being done (or not being done) to counter the trend in this cogent
and fluent piece of urban history.
Venice has had its highs and lows - as befits a place
whose city fathers include Alaric the Visigoth and Attila the Hun - but
none so fraught as those last 50 years. As Keahey trimly unravels the
situation, a combination of manmade miseries - including everything from
the industrial pumping of well water, the filling of canals, the diversion
of waterways, all the way to global warming - and natural ones, such as
the compression of the silt bed, are spelling the doom of the city, its
art and architectural wonders.
The beauty of Keahey's study is its breadth of approach,
covering not only the specific environmental problems besetting Venice,
but also presenting a geological history of the town and the lagoon, the
evolution of its urban morphology, and lovely interludes of his own late-night
travels about Venice, as atmospheric as Whistler nocturnes. But what reveals
the nature of Venice's plight most of all is Keahey's dissection of the
Venetian political system, back through the period of the Republic - which
impacts the way business is done to this day - though especially the period
since WWII.
What becomes clear is that a long-term problem for
the inundation of Venice couldn't be a worse fit for a politics of patronage
and favors and an elephantine bureaucracy. A perfect example is in the
one best approach to the flooding - gates to control water flow - that
have been stymied by a combination of vested interests, misallocations
of funds, and conflicting impact worries.
Yet as Keahey notes, "humans, in the end, will have
nothing to say in the matter." Nature will have its way: Venice is going
down. There is still time to see it. Bring your boots.
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Kirkus Reviews, Dec. 1, 2001
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