The Consequences of Damming Rivers in the Developing World

By Bill McKibben, OnEarth Magazine. Posted December 8, 2006.

We forget now that the American environmental movement was born not in reaction to smog or to dirty water, but to dams. That John Muir, the great conservationist of the first half of the twentieth century, founded the Sierra Club to fight the dam at Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy, and that David Brower, Muir's successor, built the club into the prototype of modern activism in the struggles over dams at Dinosaur National Monument, Glen Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. We forget because our big-dam days are over -- almost everything that could be plugged with concrete long since has been. But the rest of the world is still deep in these fights. In fact, in many places they still define both environmentalism and development, as journalist Jacques Leslie's superb account, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), makes clear.

Leslie has written a volume that is heir, both in organization and in power, to Encounters With the Archdruid, John McPhee's classic profile of Brower and his fight against dam-nation, much of which was written from deep within the canyons of the Colorado. Leslie chronicles three people whose lives have been shaped by the fight over dams. One is a full-out opponent, one an ambivalent expert, and one a bureaucrat trying to deal with the legacy left to him by a century of dams.

The first -- and most beautifully wrought -- portrait is of Medha Patkar, an Indian woman who has been battling the Narmada Dam for decades. Narmada has become the prototype of the big third-world dam: expensive, environmentally ruinous, and essentially impossible to stop. Patkar and her activist group, Narmada Bachao Andolan, came incredibly close -- they forced the World Bank for the first time to back down from funding a dam.

But India was too committed to the plan to be deterred. By a 2-to-1 vote of the Indian supreme court the project went ahead in 2000, and as Leslie's account opens, Patkar has been reduced to trying to keep the dam from going higher. Her favorite tactic: to chain herself to a piece of ground and wait for the waters to rise, daring the authorities to let her drown. This approach (used in California, too, in the fight over the Stanislaus River a quarter of a century ago) draws its inspiration from Gandhi, but Leslie's brilliant and unsparing portrait makes it clear that Patkar is not the happy warrior that we remember the Mahatma to be. Leslie searches for the source of her incredible courage and commitment, talking to her family and the friends of her younger life, and traces much of her relentless drive to the unhappiness of her early marriage, where her obvious talents were suffocated. When she finally left, says one friend, "she was at her lowest level, very depressed.... She couldn't see what she could do."

For Leslie, that description clicked. "Medha's suffering preceded her [Narmada] career. She did not suffer because anti-dam activism required suffering. She suffered first, then found a meaningful expression for it in the valley. Suffering became her fuel and her power and her validation, the proof of her commitment to the cause and the source of her magnetism."

This is convincing, and it describes a fair number of talented activists I've known over the years. It's also the stuff of a great novel, especially as it is deftly interwoven with the suffering of the people whose lives are being wrecked by the rising waters. Its operatic quality sets a bar that the rest of the book never quite meets; Leslie's other characters are less troubled, less charismatic. They retire, they don't try to kill themselves.

Still, their stories are remarkable. Thayer Scudder, "the world's leading dam resettlement expert," has spent an entire career studying dam resettlement as an anthropologist and working as a consultant for international agencies like the World Bank to evaluate new projects -- always hoping for what Leslie calls "one good dam." His first project, as a young anthropologist in the 1950s, was the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River along what is now the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. It was the first big dam the World Bank ever financed, and it turned into a horror story of everything that could possibly go wrong, especially the resettlement project that Scudder chronicled. At first the Tonga tribespeople refused to believe their villages would be inundated -- how could a wall on the river accomplish that? When they were finally forced away (only after many of their spear-clutching men were massacred by police) it was to barren, unfamiliar, and droughty land. Leslie visits there 45 years later and finds the villagers are still hoping that the dam will be taken down and that they can return to their homes, or at least that Scudder will come back and explain how it all happened. (He can't bear to, perhaps because of the many children in the community named for him or his wife, Molly.) One old man summed up the mood: "There is nothing to do," he said. "Just sit and wait. Maybe die."

See more stories tagged with: developing countries, water resources, environmental issues, hydro power, dams

Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature" and "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age."

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