There is an unhealthy public sentiment, I think, fueled by a few firebrands that is resulting in a wholesale rejection of experimentation and ambition. In Germany in 1932 there was a wild proposal for a peaceful, broader union for a disjointed continent reeling from the horrors of the Great War that captivated the public in ways that no national party or platform could, unfortunately humanist and engineer Herman Sörgel's grandiose plans were overcome by other events. Perhaps public distrust of demagogues would have served the world better in some instances.

Sörgel's movement was based on the prescient warning that governments must keep pace with technological developments or else risk becoming merely an instrument or a nuisance for innovators. The most significant change that the native of Regensburg on the Danube had experienced personally was that the sluices and dams along German waterways had successfully harnessed the rivers for commercial use and looking toward the example of the nautical empire of Venice and other port cities, Sörgel proposed no less than damming the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar to the Dardanelles in the Black Sea in order to reclaim fertile and productive lands (Neuland) from the Mediterranean basin and selectively flood the Sahara Desert, making the African continent more self-supporting, in his view, and undoing geology and reuniting the land-masses as Atlantropa plus getting a surplus of hydro-electric power in the bargain. I am not sure if this project was feasible, but he went as far as deploying a security detail to Gibraltar to stave off attempts of sabotage by jealous Anglo-Saxons should the building ever get underway. Projects like the Aswan High Dam and enormous wind parks or even the monumental engineering effort to save Venice itself from flooding were perhaps less lofty but probably also neither assailable without Sörgel's vision. The project failed and the regime that came into power prevented his further work, although the engineer contributed a great deal to the electrification of Germany and expanding the network of river traffic. There is an institute dedicated to his study and publications in Bad Homburg, not so far away, that I plan to visit.