After decades of talking about it, planning and construction, the giant dam on China’s Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River has finally been erected. “Once completed, the dam would be the largest in the world—as high as a sixty-story building and as wide as five Hoover Dams. The official price tag was more than twenty-one billion dollars, roughly half of which would be funded by a tax on electricity across China.” And after evacuating hundreds of thousands of residents who lived along the river, the river rose in early June, flooding villages and thousands of years of history…