This month a construction consortium delivered the Colombian government final plans for the most ambitious engineering project ever undertaken on the Magdalena, Colombia’s longest river. The blueprints call for dredges to begin clawing rocks and silt from long stretches of the murky-green Magdalena early next year as engineers design canals and levees to funnel the river’s flow through a narrow channel. Environmentalists warn of immense damage to the Magdalena’s hydrological and biological processes and to those of its vast associated ecosystems. “When you channel a river and sever its connections with its drainage basin, its tributaries, floodplains, lagoons and swamps, you kill it,” says Juan Darío Restrepo, a professor of earth sciences at Medellín’s EAFIT University. The government touts the six-year, US$1.3... [Log in to read more]