For the past week and a half, my feed has been full of images of the aftermath of devasting floods across the South, as another hurricane gains strength in the Gulf of Mexico. But nearly a decade ago, in early 2015, I found myself contemplating the history, value, and meaning of a shiny squiggly line. Before me was “Pin River – Yangtze,” a sculpture made of thousands of silver pins that traces the course of the Yangtze River.

The sculpture was one of many focused on the world’s waterways by artist Maya Lin that I encountered that winter. Her exhibition, Maya Lin: A History of Water at the Orlando Museum of Art, featured two-by-four boards of varying heights to mimic the topography of mountains, floating wires bent into the likeness of underwater landmasses, and bodies of water made of pins, silver, and marble. During a lecture, she discussed the rivers, oceans, and lakes that inspired her work as well as her desire to protect them and the species they sustain.

“People focus on what they can see,” Lin said of rivers in a museum piece about the exhibition. “In order to protect it, you have to see it in its entirety.”

 I would add, that to want to protect something, you also have to respect it, to understand it. A few years earlier, I learned this lesson during a cruise along the Yangtze River. As I journeyed from Chongqing down the river, I sailed past tributaries, mountains, bridges, and holy temples that had existed for centuries. I also passed by signs marking everything that would soon be under water. This was 2008, a year before the Three Gorges Dam project was set to flood areas upstream from the barrier. Among the largest in the world, the dam was developed to generate electricity, increase shipping capacity, and reduce floods which plagued the plains surrounding the river.

But it would also displace families, destroy homes, and relocate entire villages. The cruise stopped in the largest of those villages, Fengdu, so we could tour homes, markets, and rice fields that were slated to disappear. I met some of the families, and snapped a photo of the shoes they lined up neatly outside of a home that would soon be entirely submerged.

On this trip, I learned many things, including how controlling a river can change it. How, in trying to protect people, you can demolish heritage and homes. And how, often, progress is a name we give to things that erase the past and the valuable things we learned from it.