Once again, I have to give kudos to Conrad for correctly envisioning the Three Gorges Dam many months ago as “the world’s largest open-air latrine.” Looking at this article, I’d say it’s even worse than that. [Link requires registration. It’s worth it.]

WANZHOU, China – When this city decided to dam a tributary to the mighty Yangtze River, the city fathers searched for a suitable name for the beautiful artificial lake they said would form. They settled on Goddess Lake.

They planned a tree-lined park along its shores, a tranquil respite from city life. Little boats would ply its waters.

Six months after Goddess Lake began filling up, it’s become a cesspool filled with pig blood, dead fish, raw sewage, dye and runoff from tanneries.

“Can you see the sewage pipe dumping into the lake over there?” taxi driver Lu Yongheng asked. He pointed to effluent cascading into the lake, which is a few hundred yards from the Yangtze River.

Similar stories of environmental degradation are unfolding along the Yangtze upriver from the Three Gorges Dam. As the huge dam and smaller dams along the river’s tributaries block the water, the flushing and self-cleaning action of the Yangtze River basin has slowed.

Reservoirs are becoming sewers, filled with trash and smelly water. Local officials refuse to shut down polluting factories, fearful that unemployment will rise. Edicts from Beijing on controlling industrial waste go unheeded.

This was predicted by nearly every respectable expert, like Simon Winchester, who in his great travelogue The River at the Center of the World warned that this stinking mess was inevitable. The dam, he said, was an aberration that would turn China’s most spectacular vistas into an uncontrollable heap of shit.

And what’s at the heart of it? The same greed, the same rush to cash in that’s causing so many Guangdong factory workers to sacrifice their fingers and limbs.

The environmental deterioration that accompanies the $22 billion project shows how local authorities can thwart the toothless dictates of Beijing, and how zeal to sustain China’s economic growth often trumps concerns about pollution.

The central government has ordered hundreds of factories along the river closed because they were heavy polluters. But local officials have balked.

It’s a real conundrum. I can appreciate the position the local officials are in: If they were to close the factories, their constituents would be jobless. But shouldn’t this have been taken into consideration before the project went online?

Things are poised only to get worse. We are about to witness the spectacular rape and pillage of the once indomitable and splendid Yangtze, reduced amid the Three Gorges to a rotting, excrement-filled hole. An immense, overflowing Chinese toilet.