We're Paying the Price Today for Decades of Relentless Dam Building

By Rachel Olivieri, AlterNet. Posted September 18, 2008.

Decades ago three new dams were started every day. But the debts of
temporary prosperity are all coming due and payable today.

Between 1950 and 1970, three new dam projects were started every
single day in the world. Today, primarily in China, Turkey, Brazil,
Japan and India, one new dam project begins daily with an average
completion date of four years. Fifteen hundred dams are currently
under construction worldwide.

Dams fragment, divert and subjugate the world's rivers. In one long
lifespan, beginning with the inauguration of Hoover Dam in 1936, the
engineering marvel of the 20th century, civilization has altered the
most important function that makes the earth work, water. Thus,
transmuting humanity into something foreign to the earth it inhabits
-- a stranger to the very system which gave rise to our species.

The late Carl Sagan was among precious few visionary humans who shared
the extraordinary ability to differentiate between deep thought and
deep nonsense and recognized the persistence of a satisfying delusion
to perpetuate the latter. Dr. Sagan wrote, "We go about our daily
lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little
thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life
possible, to the gravity that glues us to an earth that otherwise
sends us spinning off into space or to the atoms of which we are made
and on whose stability we fundamentally depend."

Without some sense, some outline of how the earth works and our
relationship to it, one is deprived of knowing, let alone of asking,
the really important questions that promote regenerative life and
prevent massive-scale destruction and degeneration.

It is only in blindness that ignorance can find engineering arrogance
and feed the certainty of human expediency -- that millions of dams
can exist worldwide strangling the lubricant of life itself. It is
true that dams have created a seemingly unlimited oasis in arid and
semi-arid regions of the world and have produced unimaginable
population centers in water-stressed locations, made possible food
production on marginal arid lands, and provided cheap taxpayer
subsidized water and artificial lakes aplenty for fishing, camping and
boating.

It seems a good thing, yet, what isn't accounted for is the short-term
duration and ecological costs. It has created this artificial bonanza
by short-circuiting the natural system of limitations much as the one
time wonder of fossil fuels has short-circuited and driven the
industrial revolution. The debts of temporary prosperity are all due
and payable in the 21st century.

In the present state of affairs, water, energy, population, war,
global economic expansionism, and failing ecological systems are
sending shockwaves throughout the vulnerable global community while
staggering the biosphere which keeps us among the living tentatively.

Earth Recycling

The world's water budget is a fixed volume and has remained unchanged
for roughly 2.2 billion years in its present state. About 1 percent of
the world's total water circulates as freshwater while oceans
represent 97 percent of the world's stores and the remaining 2 percent
is tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps. This finite water pie
divides ever more thinly as population, agriculture and the industrial
economy expands.

The uninterrupted Earth is a dynamic solar and geothermal energy
system which powers the hydrologic and rock cycles. It conducts and
convects energy flows from the earth's 10,000 degree iron core outward
through the mantle and lithosphere (crust) generating plate collisions
that move continents and trip earthquakes. Magma driven plate
collisions uplift mountain ranges and setoff volcanoes recycling lava
and gases on land and underwater replenishing both with life-producing
minerals.

Solar energy evaporates surface water primarily from oceans to
atmosphere to land as water or snow. Erosive rainfall or expanding ice
in rock crevices tears down mountains as fast as they rise. The
Earth's lumpy land surface is a massive drainage system. From high to
low, meandering and networked creeks and rivers drive the rock and
mineral cycle. A river system operates on the principle of erosion and
deposition. As a river gains water volume and speeds up it erodes and
picks up rock and sediment. As it loses volume and slows down it drops
some of its load. Large pulses of water flush sediments onto the
rivers floodplain creating fertile soil before arriving at its delta
entry to the sea.

Remaining sediments combine with the heavy basalt sea floor at the
shoreline which is being subducted under the lighter continental plate
from volcanic spreading forces at the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. This
continuous underwater volcanic ridge runs like the seams of a baseball
throughout the world's oceans. Everything cycles like a big conveyor;
from Mid-Oceanic Ridge pushing the sea floor towards continental
plates where it subducts back into the mantle to raise a mountain or
explode through a volcano over geologic time. Dams, known as
nickpoints, interrupt and distort the natural transport machinery
between land and sea.

River Interrupted

Dams quiet the waters and backfill canyons forming massive lakes that
produce and release vast amounts of methane from rotting vegetation
underwater. The energy-deprived river unloads its rock and sediment
load filling the reservoir, predicting its eventual self-cancellation
by virtue of sedimentation fill. The only question is how will it end
and what will civilization do when it does? What engineering-dominate
options remain to further alter, manipulate or control the world?

The National Inventory on Dams shows the United States has constructed
79,000 dams large enough to require state and federal monitoring.
These higher risk categories are often located near enough to
population centers to pose a direct safety risk to human life and
property. Worldwide, there are 800,000 similarly sized dams that are
regulated and present equal challenges. Inventoried or not, total dams
in the US may exceed 2.5 million and perhaps tens of millions
worldwide. They interrupt and fragment the rock cycle and flow of more
than 60 percent of the world's major rivers with one or more large
dams.

The International Commission on Large Dams reveals 45,000 dams of the
world are mega-whoppers with heights up to 1,000 feet and volume
capacities exceeding many million acre feet (MAF) of water.

A recent study measured the volume capacities of 29,484 large
reservoirs throughout the world. It determined their storage capacity
was about 8.7 billion acre feet (BAF) of freshwater. That's enough
water to make a nine foot lake out of Alaska, Texas, California,
Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada combined. This immense
artificial above-ground storage is counter intuitive to nature's
freshwater storage system which stores only .016 percent of all the
circulating freshwater in all natural lakes, rivers, streams, creeks
and atmosphere combined -- preferring instead to store 80 percent to
90 percent of the world's circulating freshwater underground free from
evaporation and sedimentation.

Still more revealing is the loss of artificial reservoir stores
through evaporation. Although evaporation rates vary from region to
region, a 1998 U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) study of California's
reservoirs in all nine major hydrologic regions recorded 2,342,800 AF
of evaporation, about .06 percent of California's 40 MAF of reservoir
storage. Using a back-of-the-envelope estimation applying .06 percent
evaporation rate to the world's 8.7 BAF of reservoir stored water
yields 522 MAF of evaporation which is about 2.5 years of total
California rainfall and 16 years of California water draws for
agriculture. That's water that doesn't infiltrate as groundwater to
feed wells or perennial streams, or grow food, or evapotranspire
through wetlands, grasslands, woodlands, and forests, or provide water
for wildlife (aquatic and terrestrial) and the billion humans on the
planet who don't have access to unpolluted water.

The World Commission on Dams estimates that 3.1 billion acre foot of
freshwater is withdrawn (as opposed to total stores) from lakes,
rivers, and aquifers annually. That equals the total discharge of 7
Mississippi Rivers, or 22 Columbia Rivers, or 221 Colorado Rivers.
Here again it would cover with 3 foot of water the above mentioned
seven states totaling 1 billion surface acres and is 93 times the
amount of water drawn from all California reservoirs by agriculture
annually -- a lot of water. The 3.1 billion acre foot number is still
more revealing when one considers that over and above storage and
withdrawals, most nearly 65 percent of all rainfall evaporates before
it can become part of either surface or groundwater stores.

Aside from warming atmospheric conditions, and considering only
current global population additions (80 million per year), the
equivalent of adding a new Germany annually, and factoring rising
water consumption rates which triple with each population doubling,
all of human enterprises will consume and significantly pollute 90
percent of all the available freshwater by 2025 leaving a scant 10
percent to support the earths dwindling water-dominant ecosystem.

Are we playing against ourselves?

When 1964 American Nobel Prizing-winning physicist Charles Townes
down-played his break-out laser technology with reporters he demurred,
"When I hear that kind of thing, it reminds me of what the beaver told
the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: 'No, I didn't
build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine.'"

In the 1960's, the age without limits, this telling remark reflects
how little was known and understood about the natural world and the
accumulative impacts of dams. Since the idea of the beaver wasn't to
dam major rivers but build small organic dams on its many tributaries.
And then these temporary ecosystems evolved and produced abundant
life. They reduced flooding and erosion, enhanced groundwater
penetration, created the valley's precious topsoil and fed a radiant
food web including decomposing bacteria, amphibians, fisheries,
insects, birds, herbivores and carnivores. Comparing a beaver to
Hoover Dam is like comparing life to death. Aldo Leopold, the
legendary and visionary U.S. Forest Service land manager of the 1920s,
30s, and 40s said dams make the land sick and provide only a temporary
prosperity followed by tremendous vulnerability. This ecological
reality is incontrovertible -- all dams have an end date.

California leads the list with dams near self-cancellation. Within the
next generation, 85 percent of all U.S. dams will have degenerated to
the point of exhausting their operational lifespan of fifty years
requiring decommissioning or massive repairs and upgrades. Now
consider that every sweet spot in every geologically sane canyon that
might reasonably hold a dam already has an aging dam, what then?

Let's pause for just a moment and ask some relevant questions. What
will it cost to maintain, repair, upgrade, and build new dams to
replace those that fail or are decommissioned, and restore
dysfunctional watersheds impacted by dams? Let me proffer a worldwide
estimate to maintain the current population of 6.7 billion without any
further additions.

Factoring ecological restoration, maintenance, repair,
decommissioning, and replacement cost of the world's developed water
infrastructure as it's currently engineered would likely be a cost
greater than all the energy expended on all engineering projects from
the beginning of civilization and this cost would recur every fifty
years or so. Now factor in a population adding 1 billion every
thirteen years?

Is it even possible at this stage of civilization to convince people
to care about a time on earth that many will not have to live in?

These statistics and trajectories have no caution value to a species
front-row seated as the primary agent of geologic change on Earth. For
example, in three long lifespans, Europeans have altered a continuous
American wilderness into a networked, layered, and interwoven mass of
asphalt-spreading, carbon-coughing, concrete-lining,
pipeshed-connecting, aqueduct-flowing, levee-bunkering,
grid-generating, wireless-transmitting, urban-sprawling, mall-cloning,
river-damming, and resource-consuming experiment in human
unconsciousness.

Dams provide that tempting illusion of prosperity whose short-term
gains literally vandalize the future of civilization and natural
terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. This reality remains an
abstraction to a developed and developing world breast-fed on cheap
energy, cheap water, and unconscious consumption of finite resources.

The tenant of the economic element states clearly that the natural
state of soil, rainfall, creeks and streams, forests, valleys,
wetlands, deserts, mountains, etc. have no intrinsic value in and of
themselves. And only those aspects that can be justified as an
economic benefit to mankind first (logging, mining, damming, intensive
agricultural production, urban development, or recreation) are
redeemable and can be supported in so far as they produce artificial
wealth through income generation. Commodification of elements cycling
and recycling from the basement of time, as its sole recognized value
displays an arrogance not intended by nature or nature's god.

If the current growing population of 6.7 billion is considered a
benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial. If the vulnerability of
dense populations downstream of dams is a benefit to mankind, than
dams are beneficial. If agricultural production on arid lands that
require large volumes of water that salinate the soil and demand large
inputs of fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides that runoff and
pollute groundwater is considered a benefit to mankind, than dams are
beneficial. If the displacement of 80 million people from their
homelands to accommodate dams is a benefit to mankind, than dams are
beneficial. If the destruction of life-supporting ecosystems and
fishery resources is a benefit to mankind, than dams are beneficial.
If the inequitable sharing of benefits and costs is a benefit to
mankind, than dams are beneficial. If debt burden, cost overruns,
deferred maintenance costs and the impoverishment of people is a
benefit to mankind, than dams are the most beneficial engineering
endeavor of human history second only to nuclear weapons. If that's
the guess then God help us, because common sense hasn't.