Intertidal
Yuvan Aves
Bonnier, £22.00
Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane
W. W. Norton, $31.99
When Jawaharlal Nehru called dams “temples of modern India” in 1954, he was expressing a belief shared by all the dominant faiths: to dam a river was to develop a nation. Over the course of the twentieth century, humans built, on average, one large dam a day, hulking structures of steel and concrete designed to control flooding, facilitate irrigation, and generate electricity. Dams were also lucrative contracts, large-scale employers, and the physical instantiation of a messianic drive to conquer territories and control nature. Some of the results of that drive were charismatic mega-infrastructure—the Hoover on the Colorado River or the Aswan on the Nile—but most of the tens of thousands of dams that dot the Earth’s landscape have drawn little attention. These are the smaller, though not inconsequential, barriers that today impede the flow of water on nearly two-thirds of the world’s large waterways. Chances are, what your map calls a “lake” is actually a reservoir, and that thin blue line that emerges from it once flowed very differently.
Damming a river is always a partisan act. Even when explicit infrastructure goals—irrigation, flood control, electrification—were met, other consequences were significant and often deleterious. Across the world, river control displaced millions of people, threatening livelihoods, foodways, and cultures. In the western United States, dams were often an instrument of colonialism, used to dispossess Indigenous people and subsidize settler agriculture. And as dams slowed the flow of water, inhibited the movement of nutrients, and increased the amount of toxic algae and other parasites, they snuffed out entire river ecologies. Declining fish populations are the most evident effect, but dams also threaten a host of other animals—from birds and reptiles to fungi and plants—with extinction. Every major dam, then, is also a sacrifice zone, a place where lives, livelihoods, and ways of life are eliminated so that new sorts of landscapes can support water-intensive agriculture and cities that sprout downstream of new reservoirs.
If all construction stopped tomorrow, most of the planet’s rivers would remain confined behind earth and concrete.
Such sacrifices have been justified as offerings at the temples of modernity. Justified by—and for—whom, though? Over the course of the twentieth century, rarely were the costs and benefits weighed thoughtfully and decided democratically. As Kader Asmal, chair of the landmark 2000 World Commission on Dams, concluded, “There have been precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came about, how dams perform over time, and whether we are getting a fair return from our $2 trillion investment.” A quarter-century later, Asmal’s words ring ever truer. A litany of dams built in the mid-twentieth century are approaching the end of their expected lives, with worrying prospects for their durability. Droughts, magnified and multiplied by the effects of climate change, have forced more and more to run below capacity. If ever there were a time to rethink the mania for dams, it would be now.
There is some evidence that a combination of opposition, alternative energy sources, and a lack of viable projects has slowed the construction of major dams. But a wave of recent and ongoing construction, from India and China to Ethiopia and Canada, continues to tilt the global balance firmly in favor of water impoundment. A narrow definition of “green” energy—focused on ending greenhouse gas emissions rather than more holistic assessments of ecological impact—seduced a generation of hydropower proponents who think dams are a sustainable alternative to coal and gas power plants. The result is that even if all construction stopped tomorrow, most of the planet’s rivers would remain confined behind earth and concrete. As it turns out, it’s easier to build a dam than to take one down.
Still, something profound is unfolding along the Klamath River, a waterway that flows out of Oregon into northern California before emptying into the Pacific. There, the largest such project in U.S. history has successfully de-constructed four large dams, restoring the river’s unimpeded flow, and begun the slow, careful work of restoring the habitat. The removals are the result of decades of advocacy by Native Americans, including members of the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, and Klamath tribes. Their ancestral homelands were once host to some of the most plentiful salmon runs in the world, but by the end of the twentieth century, fish populations dropped precipitously—in some cases, nearing extinction. Until the 1970s the Klamath River was the third-largest salmon run in the western United States. By 2014 its productivity had dropped by 95 percent. A major reason was the loss of spawning habitat: the four Klamath dams, built from 1918 to 1964, lacked any means of fish passage, leaving generations of salmon unable to lay eggs on some 400 miles of their historic habitat. The barriers also blocked nutrients from flowing down the river and raised the water temperature to levels dangerous for nearly all river life.
Biologists refer to salmon as a keystone species. When returning to rivers, the fish circulate carbon and nitrogen from the ocean to hundreds of miles inland; in turn, bears and ospreys who eat the salmon transfer the carcasses further inland, where fungi further decompose it, making the forests healthier. To many of the Klamath region’s Indigenous populations, salmons’ significance extends further: the fish is an anchor to ceremonial life and, for most of the tribes’ history, was a principal food source. Its decline—including a dramatic mass death in 2002 due to drought and federal mismanagement—is therefore part of a much longer history of U.S. settler colonialism, one point on an arc stretching from the genocidal violence and dispossession of the gold rush to subsequent federal and state restrictions on Indigenous fishing and controlled burns.
The plight of the salmon is a long-running, compounding crisis, one that historically garnered little external sympathy—and, from the farmers and ranchers who benefit from federal irrigation projects at the headwaters, provoked outright resistance. Nor were the dams’ architects and master planners much moved. When asked about the loss of salmon due to dams in 1994, Floyd Dominy, the federal commissioner who presided over U.S. water resources throughout the 1960s, was unrepentant. “Now, I’m sure people can survive without salmon, but I don’t think people can survive without beans and potatoes and lettuce,” he told a journalist. “I think that there’s substitutes for eating salmon. You can eat cake.”
In his final volume, Scott demonstrates the ecological oppression on which political orders depend.
Technically, Dominy wasn’t wrong: there were substitutes. But for Indigenous people along the Klamath, the salmons’ decline brought on a striking increase in diet-related disease and a loss of knowledge about traditional foodways, as Kari Marie Noorgaard, a scholar working with the Karuk Tribe, has documented. For the Karuk people, dams were not only denying them their diet; they threatened their very way of life.
Indigenous advocates pleaded their case for decades, but PacifiCorp, the power company that owned and operated the dams under a license granted them by the federal government, was intransigent. The walls would stay up. At least part of the activists’ conundrum was the sheer scale of river politics: even when rivers do not flow across political boundaries, upland residents frequently differ in language, culture, and interests from their downstream counterparts. As rivers were remade into sources of hydroelectric power to be owned and operated by multinational companies, the scale of conflicting interests and worldviews grew even larger. Advocates for dam removal on the Klamath River knew its seasons and species with an intimacy borne of experience, yet they were forced to negotiate with executives living nowhere near the region who knew the river only in terms of megawatts and revenue. In 2004, tribal representatives travelled to Edinburgh to protest at the annual general meeting of Scottish Power, which at the time owned PacifiCorp. Later, when Berkshire Hathaway bought PacifiCorp, they took their protest to Warren Buffett’s door in Omaha.
Against the odds, the Indigenous advocates eventually gained not only momentum but a range of alliances—with government officials, fishing enthusiasts, and even some farmers with whom they had historically competed for river water. After many false starts, a 2020 agreement began the removal process. Today the river runs freely, and, in place of four dams, an elaborate project is underway to restore the degraded ecology, involving the careful selection and propagation of native seeds on the muddy grounds of what were once reservoirs.
The saga of the Klamath provokes a more fundamental, yet often ignored, set of questions: What is a river for? Irrigation? Leisure? None of the above? Or, taking a step still further back: What is a river in the first place? A line on a map, winding its way to the ocean? Or a set of relations—between silt and water, animals and humans—that expands across an entire watershed? In an era of interlocking climate crises, we need answers to such fundamental questions, and in his posthumously published In Praise of Floods, the late James C. Scott offers an expansive, thoughtful set of them.
In Scott’s view, it is tempting to say there is no such thing as a river, if that term implies a line on a map or a channel of water moving downhill. Instead, he argues, every river is a complex living ecology built of innumerable tributaries, a massive drainage system of veins—some thick, some thin—that find their way across a basin, eventually to the sea. “It is the entire waterscape that compromises what we conventionally call a river,” he writes. “Such is, or ought to be, our understanding of the term watershed.”
As the architect and planner Dilip da Cunha explains in his pathbreaking work on which Scott draws, the notion of a firm line between land and water is a historical construction, the product of massive material and ideological investments in the making of landed property and navigable trade routes. The reality, Scott argues, is something much more fluid, with accretions and erosions both slow and sudden.
Even on a shorter time frame, rivers belie assumptions of routine. The constant movement of silt and rocks means navigating a river takes not only local knowledge but timely knowledge. On the Ayeyarwady River, the backbone of Burma, which forms Scott’s principal example, successfully navigating during the low-water period requires changing boat pilots every couple hours in order to minimize running aground on the shifting shallows; each has an intricate knowledge of one particular stretch of river.
Scott also rejects the “deeply anthropocentric” way mainstream observers imagine rivers, beginning with the very term “flood.” The seasonal expansion of waterways, buoyed by snowmelt or rainfall, is “just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” In a healthy ecology, this supports an interconnected population of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, insects, microbes, and plants who depend on the seasonal hydration of a “vast in-between landscape.” The “flood pulse” may be short-lived, but it provides an abundance of nutrients that help throughout the year. The reason floods are equated with disasters is due to a prior offense: human encroachment on the “natural territory of the river—an act of ‘trespass.’” In Scott’s view, original crimes like these go unseen and unpunished while “enslaved” rivers are incarcerated by dams and other flood controls. “Can a river transformed by dams into a linear chain of lakes, often completely detached from one another, even be called a river?” he worries.
Building on his earlier work on the “deep history” of state-building, Scott is keen to emphasize that river control is not new. For centuries, the effort to control floods through smaller embankments, levies, and dikes was necessary for states that relied on floodplain agriculture for food and taxes. Yet as it turned out, what suited a royal court was disastrous for marshes, swamps, ponds, and other wetland habitats, all of which rely on the lateral, meandering movement of river water to survive. The elimination of these spaces constitutes what Ellen Wohl calls the “Great Drying,” in which water is routed into prescribed channels so that well-drained soils replace muddy expanses. In the case of the Ayeyarwady today, it means the remaining floodplain wetlands are only a quarter to a third of what they were at Burma’s independence in 1948. Whatever benefits it may involve, Scott thinks, the resulting pollution, extinction, and displacement make the “cure” of flood control worse than the illness.
Waterways “had to be killed for the city, as it stands now, to live.”
Rejecting the view that waterways exist for the use and enjoyment of humans alone, Scott’s account abounds with the interests—and even the ventriloquized voices—of riparian animals: the otters, storks, fireflies, and microbes for which waterways are an “indispensable lifeworld.” This turn to “multispecies justice” marks something new in an oeuvre that has previously focused on the oppression of peasants, enslaved people, and so-called “barbarians.” But Scott’s riverine animals and plants do not represent a break from his abiding themes—namely, the constitutive domination at the heart of states. While his prior works traced domination’s human toll, this final volume demonstrates the ecological oppression on which political orders depend in the first place.
Given the extent of the ecocide unfolding in waterways today—poisoned by toxic runoff, heated to uninhabitable temperatures, denuded of living organisms—Scott’s multispecies account is an essential perspective. But is his vision sufficient for addressing the task at hand? In Praise of Floods arrays algae, salmon, and other nonhuman “citizens” of the river against the anthropocentric degradation of waterways. In the process, though, this focus ends up lumping together all humans. The dam engineer and gold miner, the boat captain and rice farmer: in Scott’s account, all are abusing the river. Such an unnuanced depiction tends to blur together crucial distinctions. Not only are some demographics more brutalizing than others; certain human populations also have a shared interest in protecting and promoting healthy riverscapes. Finding these fractures and points of potential solidarity is precisely the analytic and political work necessary to restore ecologies from their centuries-long destruction.
More useful in this regard is Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive? Composed equally of captivating nature writing and travelogue, MacFarlane’s book is an urgent call to recognize the extraordinary wealth in uncaptured rivers and to restore those which have been polluted, cemented, and dried beyond recognition. “We have become increasingly waterproofed,” he complains, sharing with Scott a refreshing recognition of the necessarily interconnected species and ecologies of riverscapes. MacFarlane’s lyrical narration captures both his wonder at interconnected river systems and his lament at their degradation. “Muscular, wilfull, worshipped and mistreated,” he waxes,
rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology. They give us metaphors to live by, and they decline our attempts to pass them. Unruly, fluid and utterly other, rivers are—I have found—potent presences with which to imagine water differently.
The riverine enchantment MacFarlane conjures up is a necessary corrective to the abstract, instrumental treatment of waterways by engineers and financiers—an approach that shares much in common with Scott’s book. But where In Praise of Floods leaves its political implications somewhat speculative, Is a River Alive? offers up a tenable set of strategies: a task it accomplishes by amplifying Indigenous ideas about the vitality and rights of nature. Rather than seeing rivers, mountains, and other ecologies as inert “resources” to be exploited, a range of Indigenous traditions, MacFarlane finds, approach them as something less like “stuff” and more like kin. Marisol de la Cadena, an anthropologist of the Andes, calls them “earth beings.” Indigenous movements have long insisted that mainstream politics shed its commodified, secularized assumptions about what a river or mountain is, let alone what it can be used for. In Ecuador, earth beings received constitutional recognition and protection in the 2008 Constitution. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2017 legislation recognized that the Whanganui waterscape is a living ancestor to the Whanganui people. As a legal person, the river would be represented by a body of River Guardians who have an obligation to promote and protect it. For proponents, such a move is not dissimilar to how other subjects—women and minors, the imprisoned and the colonized—have historically improved their lot by achieving legal personality and specific accompanying rights.
As a legal theory, this innovation no doubt faces an uphill battle, not least in the United States. But if the legal personification of rivers and mountains seems odd, it is no stranger than that other corporeal fiction populating our law books: the corporation. Just as corporate personhood is not equivalent to human personhood, the point of recognizing the legal standing of earth beings is not to homogenize but to pluralize: stretching the law into a shape that can make it a vehicle—however imperfect—for worthwhile reforms.
For some advocates, legal personhood for rivers—not just humans and corporations—is an important strategy.
As a political tactic, endowing earth beings with legal personality has captured the activist imagination. From the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers to policies in various localities, MacFarlane writes, there have been “irruptions of ecocentric legislation” around the world. The book explores the implications of these new laws via three case studies. In the first, MacFarlane travels to an Ecuadorian cloud forest, where he meets forest defenders who have succeeded, in part, thanks to the country’s 2008 constitution enshrining the “Rights of Nature.” Fighting against the deathly extractivism of mining companies, they resist short-term economic booms that bring long-term harm—or as one activist puts it, “Bread today means hunger tomorrow.”
In Chennai, Yuvan Aves, a self-taught naturalist, shows MacFarlane what that hunger looks like: a city that denies, pollutes, and paves over its waterways, only to have the repressed return with a vengeance in the form of floods. In one particularly egregious example, the government of Tamil Nadu literally removed intertidal zones from official maps so as to avoid requirements for protecting known mangrove forests and sand dunes. Chennai’s resulting landscape reflects and reinforces inequalities of caste and class, as small fishing villages live in the effluence of upstream industry. Aves’s own book, Intertidal, demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s wetland ecology and poignantly conveys how waterways “had to be killed for the city, as it stands now, to live.” Between 1980 and 2010, the amount of Chennai’s landscape constituted by wetlands fell from 80 to 15 percent. A decade later, the city ran out of municipal water and had to import it from neighboring states. “Climate change may be measured in carbon,” Aves writes, “but its mother tongue is water.”
At the end of Is a River Alive?, MacFarlane travels to the unceded territories of the Innu people in the Canadian province of Québec, where women like Rita Mestokosho are working to stop further damming, drowning, and channeling of waterways. Already, an area the size of New York state has been turned into a chain of reservoirs; the damming has so profoundly altered the landscape that it has changed rainfall patterns and delayed the growing season. Driven by the “delusion of resource inexhaustibility,” MacFarlane writes, the architects of Quebec’s Plan Nord, as the project is called,see waterways as merely a means to turn hydroelectric turbines. Plan Nord aims to “industrialize the remote region north of the 49th Parallel” through an even larger network of dams. Doing so will mean plowing roads through forests and blasting out rock to form channels, as well as pouring mountains of concrete over reinforced steel. All of this will emit enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, damage wilderness, and degrade the waterways—despite the marketing of hydroelectricity as “green.” The Indigenous advocates MacFarlane interviews emphasize the importance of this vulnerable landscape and point to the hypocrisy around which entities receive legal personhood. “It seems crazy that we give a corporation that’s ten years old rights, but we won’t give rights to a ten-thousand-year-old river,” one activist complains. For her and organizations like the Observatoire International des Droits de la Nature in Montreal, legal personhood for rivers—not just humans and corporations—is an important strategy to ensure the rights of nature can be promoted and protected.
As MacFarlane knows, his book’s titular question is only the start. In an era when death is meted out in violence slow and fast, structural and direct, being recognized as alive is hardly sufficient to remain so. It might be the case, he worries, that there is a “fundamental incommensurability” between the legalities of “rights” and the imponderabilia of rivers, their ecologies, and the populations entangled therein. Can a constitution or a court ever capture enough of the subtleties of the salmons’ lives to grant them a measure of justice? And what would such justice even look like? If we lack a language precise enough to appreciate the subtle interconnections and dynamics of rivers, then perhaps, he suggests, we require a new vocabulary for our relationship to the natural world: one where the operative verb is not use but care and the characteristic human role is not engineer but steward.
But the task will also require sustained activism and legal innovation. As Māori legal scholar Jacinta Rutu argues, while recognition of the rights of nature is important, it must be complemented by new governance arrangements that move beyond superficial acknowledgment. Such arrangements must have the authority to make rivers more than impounded sources of electricity and irrigation. But how can that authority be won?
Working against the most ruinous effects will need to start by confronting the interlocked financial interests responsible for dams’ construction.
Ultimately, neither Scott nor MacFarlane deliver a truly satisfying answer. Both books blame the impoundment and draining of waterways on a combination of misplaced ideas and domineering state power, yet neither follow those streams all the way back up to their source: the economic significance of river controls for contemporary capitalism. Whether through gold mining, intensive irrigation, or hydroelectric power plants, an unending desire to appropriate for profit the “free gifts” of nature renders rivers vulnerable—a fact pushed out of focus by Scott’s sweeping account of “human intervention” across the centuries and MacFarlane’s brief references to “logics of objectification and extraction.” (In fact, In Praise of Floods never once uses the word “capitalism.”) Working against the most ruinous effects of mankind’s abuse of rivers, though, will need to start by confronting the interlocked financial interests responsible for dams’ construction and maintenance.
In the case of the Klamath, success came from a combination of principled advocacy and commercial logic: it would have cost the dam operators more to re-license and upgrade the dams than they would have recouped in future years. Indigenous advocates recognized this and used regulatory levers to make the thin margins of the Klamath dams even smaller. As a result, even while other interests remained unconvinced (including a small non-native community who live at the now-drained reservoirs), bottom lines bowed to activist pressure.
Such a commercial calculus will hold in some more cases. Many of the 30,000 dams the nonprofit American Rivers wants to remove by 2050 are similarly unprofitable, and some progress is happening on dam removal beyond the Klamath. But in other cases, dams simply make too much money to be undone through innovative legal strategies alone. Hydroelectric dams are especially difficult to challenge today because they are billed as “clean” energy, drawing eager clients from Silicon Valley technology giants who use them to claim progress on decarbonization while massively expanding their electricity bills. But the appeal is global, too: China’s enormous investments in dams have powered industries from steel and cement to aluminum and electronics. That these dams provide rather reliable and inexpensive electricity without actively burning hydrocarbons makes them a favorite of industries old and new. If their other costs, including environmental destruction and human displacement, are to be undone, it will require a calculus that goes far beyond a focus on emissions reduction.
This may require shifting the balance toward economic activity, like fishing or tourism, that work best in concert, not conflict, with the wider ecology. It will also require that flourishing be measured in different sorts of value and values—the type that do not appear as megawatts or revenue. And most importantly, rather than pursuing an idyl of a wilderness free of human intervention, river restoration will require authorizing communities more proximate to the river ecology to steward it, such as in California, where the Yurok Tribe recently took possession of land previously expropriated from them in the Klamath basin.
With their elegiac tone, Scott’s and MacFarlane’s books have less to say about the forward-looking projects taking place in basins like the Klamath, lively processes full of surprise and subtlety. When I visited the Klamath last year, I was struck by how much machinery it took to restore nature: bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks, and quite a bit of dynamite were needed by the (de)construction workers tearing down and carting away the concrete and metal. Some of the work is being done by tribes who remain closely involved in the project, but other parts are organized by large engineering conglomerates who specialize in building oil and gas facilities, mining operations, and, yes, dams. It is one of the many ironies of industrial modernity that unmaking it requires employing some of the same contractors responsible for extractivism in much of the world.
It would not be a stretch to see this cynically—a double-dipping profit in both degrading and restoring ecologies—but perhaps a more conciliatory perspective is appropriate: one alert to the fact that the extent of earthly degradation is so great that no path forward can remain uncontaminated. Soils are so poisoned, species extinctions so frequent, and infrastructures so weighty that sometimes, strange bedfellows are inevitable. That, at least, has been the reality in the Klamath basin, where federal and state agencies, Native American tribes, and community groups have worked alongside these commercial contractors.
Once the dams are taken out, there begins the process of restoration—an altogether more uncertain, slower-moving business. When I drove along the drained reservoirs last year, the restoration workers were using helicopters to place dead trees in the newly liberated tributaries, meant to form a conducive habitat for salmon and the creatures they eat. A more unexpected issue was the roaming horses who, deciding the newly planted native vegetation and flowing river were succulent treats, trampled the new growth and “deposited” non-native seeds previously eaten elsewhere. Fences designed to keep these unwanted animals out but permit deer and smaller mammals were hurriedly erected, but the incident is a reminder that to “restore” is not so much “to let be” as “to tend.” This is not a quick fix: although salmon were spotted in tributaries above the former dams within weeks of removal, both the extended timelines of the salmon life course and other threats, like drought, present long-term, perhaps permanent, challenges.
The Trump administration is exacerbating things by aiming its wrecking ball at crucial environmental funding and regulations—including scuttling, last month, a federal agreement concerning hydroelectric energy and salmon habitats in the Columbia river basin, a larger river system in the Pacific Northwest. If acquiescence to this state of affairs is unconscionable, then so too, the Klamath project reminds us, is a politics of purity. There, success has required a diversity of tactics, including both civil disobedience and bureaucratic maneuvering. The Native American advocates who eventually succeeded in making the case against the dams enlisted legal tools like the Endangered Species Act and built alliances with a range of different communities—from biologists to fishing enthusiasts to the contractors who knew how to detonate enough explosives to remove a 170-foot-tall dam.
The post What Does It Take to Topple a Dam? appeared first on Boston Review.
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