Earth be dammed

And Thayer Scudder?

Ted Scudder is an American anthropologist, now retired, who for many years was the only anthropologist at the California Institute of Technology and who became the world's leading authority on dam resettlement, which is a problem bigger than most people realize. The World Commission estimated that 40 to 80 million people have been resettled because of dams, and that number doesn't include the hundreds of millions who live downstream from dams and who, while they haven't been resettled, have lost something vital to their livelihood. Anyway, Ted began studying dams as a graduate student. He was asked to participate in a benchmark study on the Tonga people who lived on the Zambezi River in what, back in 1956, was Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia. The Kariba Dam was being built and these people were going to be resettled within a couple years. So he spent almost a year there and then every couple of years after the resettlement, either he or his mentor would go back and visit them again. They have now traced their course over nearly half a century, and it's quite a dismaying story. Tonga culture has nearly disintegrated.

Ted went on to study dams all over the world and became a consultant for the World Bank on their social and environmental impacts. The bank didn't listen to him because of its overwhelming interest in building dams, so he became a kind of adornment. So he's often frustrated and still looking for a good dam that will justify his career.

And then there's Don Blackmore, who falls in the pro-dam category?

Right, although he would dispute that. He'd say he's neither pro nor anti. Until he retired a year and a half ago, Don was the chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, which oversees the management of the only major river system in Australia. His commission is charged with the day-to-day operation of the River Murray, which is severely depleted because of dams and water diversions to farmers. So Don's struggle over the 14 years that he ran the commission was to persuade the farmers and politicians that they needed to return some water to the river to give it some chance of survival.

If the commission were to put you in one of the three categories, where would you fall?

I suppose I would be somewhere in between Ted and Medha, certainly on the anti-dam side -- perhaps not as dogmatically as Medha -- but with a little more certainty than Ted.

You write that you chose to write about dams because you see them as being at the crux of water struggles and our environmental future. How so?

Dams, depending on how you figure, are the biggest structures built by humans. They're huge and their impacts are monstrous. Few people realize how big those impacts are. In studying them, I have witnessed one damaged or devastated ecosystem after another. When you consider that 60 percent of the world's major river systems are now dammed, we're talking about something very big. That means that in 60 percent of river systems sediment is not flowing down to reach the sea, which causes the depletion of nutrients all along the river and, in many cases, erosion of beaches around the mouths of rivers. That's true even in Southern California, where beaches have grown dramatically smaller over the last 20 to 30 years partially as a result of dams. All these things have huge impacts that become known only decades after they start. So it's really important to look at them.

It seems clear that you also see dams as a test case for the viability of development according to the World Bank model.

Right. The World Bank and institutions like it feel that if they're not loaning money, they're not doing their job. And the amounts of money are so vast that the projects tend to overwhelm whatever locale they're in. The bank can't do small projects, which I think are very often much more appropriate, because they don't have a staff that big. It's much easier to oversee one project that costs $100 million than 100 projects that cost a million each. Central governments love these projects because it strengthens their hand. No matter what happens, that money has gone through central government treasuries and enriched them. The biggest of these projects often have everything to do with the way in which political leaders are supported by them. That top-down manner of going about matters doesn't seem to me the best way to get things done. The bank says its mission is to eliminate poverty and yet, in the example of dams, the poorest people are those usually who are displaced, and the bank shows very little interest in their fate. Only very reluctantly has it become involved in trying to make sure that resettlement projects are carried out properly. Even with their interest, they almost never are. And so the poor usually end up being poorer, which makes me think that the bank's biggest interest is really something else.

It struck me that even your pro-dam subject, Don Blackmore, doesn't advocate for building more huge dams, but in your epilogue you mention that the World Bank is indicating that it wants to get back into funding them. What's the deal?

Well, they would say that whereas the United States and Europe have already built their dams, there are many places in developing countries that have not; these places suffer from a lack of water storage or insufficient electricity and, they say, the dams will meet that need. I would respond that they are addressing immediate needs but are overlooking long-term ones. What we're finding out in the United States and Europe -- decades after these dams have been built -- is the environmental destruction that they cause -- and will eventually cause in the developing world.

Have you come across a rule of thumb for knowing when a project has become too big to be done responsibly?

I certainly don't have any numbers or anything like that, but it's interesting that even Medha Paktar was happy that there were a couple of little check-dams that generated enough electricity to light up a few light bulbs in the village where I visited. Even she and the International Rivers Network approve of small dams. Going about these things at a human level makes a lot more sense. There is a project in the Indian state of Rajasthan involving rainwater harvesting and the creation of small ponds that seems to be very effective. I haven't been there but I'd love to go. I think there are ways of doing these things on a small scale that would certainly invigorate the countryside. How you produce energy for cities is a much different question. That involves looking at energy issues much more rigorously than we've done.

Sooner or later, it seems, we in the developed world are going to have to learn to consume less energy. Do you see any way around this?

No. But I think that there are ways of consuming less that are relatively painless. Not that we don't have to sacrifice, but there are all kinds of innovations out there that are not being tapped. Instead the latest energy bill subsidizes oil companies, which to me is just outrageous. We ought to be encouraging every sort of alternative effort, putting money into research and development.

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