By Les Standiford
The writer of Last educate to Paradise tells the tale of the most important public water undertaking ever created—William Mulholland’s la aqueduct—a tale of Gilded Age ambition, hubris, greed, and one decided guy who's imaginative and prescient formed the longer term and maintains to affect us today.
In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and equipped one of many maximum civil engineering feats in heritage: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles—allowing this small, resource-challenged desolate tract urban to develop right into a sleek international city. Drawing on new examine, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million undertaking that may rework a quarter, a country, and a kingdom on the sunrise of its maximum century.
With power and colourful element, Water to the Angels brings to existence the personalities, politics, and power—including bribery, deception, strength, and bicoastal monetary warfare—behind this dramatic occasion. At a time while the significance of water is being famous as by no means before—considered via many specialists to be the basic source of the twenty-first century—Water to the Angels brings into concentration the energy of a fabled period, the may well of a bigger than existence person, and the dimensions of a important development venture, and sheds severe gentle on a prior that gives insights for our future.
Water to the Angels comprises eight pages of photos.
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Additional info for Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles
Example text
Modified after Aber and Melillo (1991). 1 Disturbance An external change of environmental conditions may or may not result in a disturbance of the system under consideration. In the case of disturbance, there is no way of returning to the initial state of the system, at least not in the short run, but the system may arrive at an alternative state, which also may appear to be a steady state (see Fig. 3). It is a task for restoration ecologists to judge the differences in quality between the two or more steady states, for example between a forest and a clear-cut forest (which then may be transformed to a semi-natural meadow).
A river valley). 3 Community species pool: the set of species present in a site within the target community, including the soil seed bank. Species pools can, according to Zobel et al. (1998), be determined on the basis of environmental similarity, functional similarity and/or phytosociological similarity between the species, or by applying an experimental approach (evaluating the results from sown seed mixtures). Weiher and Keddy (1999) provided several examples of how communities are assembled from species pools.
Functional groups and keystone species The terms functional groups and functional types (Walker 1992) have been used in studies on global change and also in restoration ecology to cope with the complex response of very many species to pronounced changes in the environmental conditions. Unfortunately, the terminology is inconsistently employed. While the term group seems to indicate a grouping of individually known species in one particular class, the term type suggests a (concrete or abstract) representative of a class of species.