A mid-20th century plan to build a canal to cut off Florida from the rest of the continent never went anywhere. I wonder how much this had to do with removing the flaccid state from the country’s body reminding everyone of castration.
While I was living in Sweden, I learned of a group of citizens who disliked the province of Scania so much that they spent their weekends chiseling away at the border, hoping that eventually the province would break off and drift away.
In terms of megalomaniacal engineering, both proposals pale in comparison to the plan of German architect Herman Sörgel, who in the 1920s proposed to build a dam across the strait of Gibraltar. This would have resulted in the Mediterranean drying out, creating a new continent connecting Africa and Europe. The benefit, as envisaged by Sörgel, would have included many millions of acres of new land. Archeologists hunting for ancient amphoras would presumably also been in favor, but I imagine the citizens of mediterranean port cities like Marseille would have been less enthusiastic. It’s also unclear if building a dam across the strait Gibraltar would have been technically feasible. It’d have been around ten times as long and six times as deep as the largest dams that have ever been build, such as the Three Gorges Dam.
Thanks to Nathan Goldwag for his blog post about the Florida canal, and thanks to Slime Mold Time Mold for the pointer to Goldwag’s blog.
Nehaveigur 