The supreme artistic beauty and wonder of Venice is inextricably tied to the natural environment that surrounds it and since the Middle Ages, the city's government maintained an engineered environmental balance with hundreds of miles of man-made dykes and seawalls. But with the demise of the Venetian Republic, environmental vigilance faltered and stopped. Floods in 1966 awakened the world to Venice's peril. Today, as a result of a multi-faceted international conservation campaign, and at great cost and effort, the city's ecological balance with its natural setting had been reestablished. But the traditional social life of the city is quickly eroding, as a tourist economy displaces the services that sustain residential life: schools, grocers, pharmacies. Can Venice survive if Venetians do not live within it?