WHY ARE BIG DAMS BEING DISCOURAGED ALL OVER THE WORLD NOW?
Answers
Big dams are plain bad. They flood people out of their homes and off their lands; wipe out endangered habitats and species; spread water-borne diseases; deprive flood plains of the water and sediments of life-giving floods (while increasing the damage floods cause to people); ruin beautiful landscapes and submerge places of great cultural or spiritual importance. And that’s just a partial charge sheet.
Big dams even cause earthquakes (because of the weight of water in reservoirs), release greenhouse gases (because of the rotting of flooded vegetation), destroy marine fisheries (because they disrupt river-borne flows of freshwater and nutrients into oceans) and lead to coastal erosion (because the sediments that eventually fill reservoirs would previously have flowed out through estuaries and then been washed back by waves to protect the shoreline). Occasionally, they collapse and drown people. In the world’s worst dam disaster – a mega-catastrophe that struck central China in 1975 when two large dams burst – as many as 230,000 people died.
The world’s baddest big dam has to be the gargantuan Three Gorges project in China. It will cause all of the problems above – on a mind-bending scale. More than half a million people are scheduled to be moved from their homes along the Yangtze by June 2003 when the first stage of filling the Three Gorges reservoir begins. By the start of the final phase of reservoir-filling in 2008 – just in time for the Beijing Olympics – a further 700,000 people (according to government statistics) will have been evicted. Chinese critics claim the final number will reach nearly two million. For their trouble, these critics have been beaten up, imprisoned and had their books and articles banned.
Human-rights abuses regularly accompany big dams – not just in China. In the 1980s more than 440 Guatemalans, mainly women and children, were murdered by paramilitaries because of their refusal to accept the resettlement package offered by the World Bank-funded electricity utility building the Chixoy dam.
Today, almost everywhere that a big dam is being proposed or built there is a community or a group of activists organizing against it. In southern Mexico, indigenous communities are fighting to win reparations for dams built 50 years ago.
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