I don't think I'm alone in loving DVD commentary tracks, often more than I like the movie itself. A lot of time, you get details that are larger than the movie itself. like with the director commentary for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Gore Verbinski talks about how hard it was to find any beautiful cove that wasn't completely developed b y people already. Look one direction and see verdant palms and cerulean sea. Turn around and check out the 40-room hotel and the attached 24-hour casino.

When the entire world is overdeveloped, sometimes destruction is an creator of new horizons and views. Two stories along that line, one from the US and one from Iraq.

Iraq first . After the first Gulf War, there were uprisings in the Mesopotamian Marshlands in southern Iraq. As part of crushing those uprisings, Saddam Hussein (using British plans that dated from the 1950s colonial period) built “an extensive and elaborate system of drainage and diversion structures”. Sounds like dams and canals to me, but it may be something more.

In any case, when the U.S. invaded in 2003, dykes near Basra were destroyed, which reflooded approximately 20% of the area. The Eden Again project is dedicated to taking this opportunity to rebuild the wetlands, and make better use of the water. (“Eden Again” comes from the legend that the Garden of Eden story may be based on these wetlands.)

The other example of creation from disaster I read about today involves the Glen Canyon. Any of you who know a bit bout the environmental movement are probably familiar with Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. One of the main plot concepts in that book was to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam, which created the artificial reservoir called Lake Powell and covered up canyons that Abbey considered as beautiful as any in the world.

Well, the ongoing drought in the southwest has caused Lake Powell to drop by 144 feet, to about 33% of what it was in July of 1999. The drought has many disturbing implications for drinking water and power generation in the Southwest and in Southern California. But ill winds and silver linings mean that you can go and see the beauty that Abbey wrote about in 1875, beauty that hasn’t been visible for over 30 years.

Travel writer Susan Spano wrote about this for the LA Times, though I read about it in the Tampa Tribune: Exposing Utah's depths