Damming Patagonia's Rivers: A Dirty Energy Business

The Pascua River, in Chilean Patagonia, has many qualities that have kept its stunning, rugged beauty intact and virtually unknown -- so far. Only one road leads anywhere near the Pascua, and that's a rough road that takes you to the end of the river's course.

To get to the head of the Pascua, because of the impassable terrain along both its sides, you have to backtrack up that lonely road and travel away from the river and into the town of Villa O'Higgins, located near Chile's border with Argentina. There you catch a ride on a boat and journey six hours across Lago O'Higgins -- South America's deepest lake. First you'll motor south along the full length of one of the lake's fingers, which is split by the Chile-Argentina border. Then you'll turn north to follow another far finger of the vast lake all the way to its tip.

There you'll find the cascading source of the Pascua River. The river literally jumps out of Lago O'Higgins into a series of class-6+ rapids and waterfalls that make it one of the fastest, wildest rivers on the planet. From Lago O'Higgins, it churns its way down through a maze of canyons that for thousands of years have delivered pristine freshwater into the Pascua from the jagged, snow-capped peaks and glaciers of the two largest ice fields on earth outside Antarctica and Greenland.

"Clean" Energy, Dirty Business

Unfortunately, if you have the money you can also get there by helicopter. That's how a consortium of gigantic transnational companies has been dropping its engineers into the Pascua's wilderness for the past several years. The consortium and its engineers are not there to enjoy the wild beauty of the river, or to learn about the fragile ecosystems that depend on the Pascua's continuing to run free. These engineers have been hired to advance plans for three mega dams that would turn the 40-mile long Pascua into three "hydropower" lakes.

The consortium -- known as "HidroAysen" -- hopes that these dam-created "reservoirs" will generate abundant electricity for Chile's largest cities and growing mining industry. HidroAysen is owned by Chile's two biggest wood and pulp producers, the Matte Group and the Angelini Group, and also by two of Europe's biggest utility companies, Enel from Italy and Acciona from Spain.

These global profit-seekers also want to put two mega-dams on Chile's picturesque Baker River, located to the north of the Pascua. The Baker has just begun to support local tourism businesses that would be virtually wiped out by the dam development. Worse yet, according to HidroAysen's plans, all the electricity from the Baker and Pascua rivers would be sent north through 1,500 miles of transmission lines, requiring one of the world's longest clearcuts -- a long nasty scar through ancient temperate rainforests. The objective is to supply Chile's growing industry and large cities. Current estimates for the cost of the dams and transmission lines together exceed four billion dollars.

HidroAysen's most vocal owner-advocate, the Matte Group, claims that its plans will bring "clean" energy to Chile. But it turns out that Matte's definition of "clean" ignores the many dirty environmental and social impacts of the proposed dams and transmission lines.

These include scores of displaced families, disrupted traditional livelihoods such as farming and ranching, spoiled local tourism, and destroyed forests. The transmission lines alone would require clearcutting thousands of acres of forest types found nowhere outside of Patagonia, dividing many Chilean communities, and irreversibly damaging several national parks, including some of earth's most scenic, such as Hornopirén National Park and Corcovado National Park. Victims of these dams would include critically endangered species such as the huemul deer, of which only 3,000 survive today.