DAMS, PART I
The world will be saved, if it can be, only by the unsubmissive.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWENTY-THREE. Dams.
Not just because they imprison rivers. Not just because they kill fish. Not just because they drown forests. Not just because they leach mercury from the soil and cause it to enter the food stream. Not just because they inundate the homes of humans and nonhumans alike (the World Commission on Dams estimated in 2000 that 40-80 million people worldwide have been displaced by dams
99). Not just because they lead to mass wastage of water (see, for example, Las Vegas, golf courses, cotton and alfalfa fields in Arizona, and so on). Not just because they’re ugly. Not just because they’re ubiquitous (quick, name three undammed rivers). Not just because they’re often intentional instruments of genocide and ecocide. Not just because they’re often promoted as environmentally “clean.” All of these could certainly be considered good enough examples of how and why civilization is killing the world. None of these are what I’m talking about right now.
Instead I’m talking about the business of dam removal. Emphasis on business. Utter lack of emphasis on dam removal. Here is part of an article that appeared this spring on the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle, which describes a beautiful canyon in northeastern California as “the best hope for two endangered populations of Sacramento River salmon—the winter run and spring run.” The article continues, “Five years ago, a consensus was reached to resuscitate the salmon runs: remove five of the eight small PG&E hydropower dams on Battle Creek and outfit the remaining three with fish ladders. It was a revolutionary concept in the 150-year history of water development in California; it would mark the first time that dams would come down rather than go up. [That’s actually not entirely accurate: there have been many other dam removals, including twenty-two just along the Klamath between 1920 and 1956 at a total cost to the state of $3,000.
100] But today the projected price tag for a Battle Creek restoration has skyrocketed, from $26 million to about $75 million, and not a single dam has been removed.”
101So much has been spent to provide so little help to fish that even a spokesperson for a landowners group made up mainly of cattle ranchers (not generally known as militant environmentalists) said, “Everyone up here is absolutely appalled at the cost over-runs, especially considering how little has been accomplished.”
102The spokesperson is wrong. Much has been accomplished. In fact the process is accomplishing precisely what it’s supposed to. The point was never to save salmon. Part of the point is to pretend to save salmon but the real point is, as always within this culture, to make money. And that, it is doing.
Seventy-five million dollars to remove from five to eight dams. That’s between 9 and 15 million per dam. These dams are not big. The article states they’re twenty to thirty feet high, but the accompanying photos suggest they’re smaller. I’m guessing fifteen feet high by three feet thick by a hundred feet across (although of course span is far less important for demolition than height or thickness, since you only have to breach the dam in one or two places, with the water doing the rest).
I don’t know if it will matter to readers that my first degree was in mineral engineering physics when I say that I could take down these dams for far less than 9 to 15 million each. I took (and hate to admit, enjoyed) classes in statics, fluid mechanics, strengths of materials, and so on. I have a working knowledge of engineering, physics, chemistry. I could do it no problem.
Wanna hear my plan?
Choose a date in mid-October, when water is lowest. For weeks beforehand keep sluice gates wide to lower the water even further. Announce the dam’s removal date long in advance, and tell salmon lovers from all over the West (and especially the tribes whose lives have been intertwined with these fish forever) that you’re going to tear down the dam. Ask them to bring sledgehammers. Ask them if they’ve heard of Amish community barn raisings, and tell them we’re going to have a community dam demolition. Those without sledges can bring wheelbarrows, shovels, picks. Those without tools can bring sandwiches and big coolers of juice. I can guarantee hundreds, if not thousands, of people would show up to work shoulder to shoulder, bashing away at this barrier that separates fish—and humans—from their home. Chips would fly as fast as jokes, chunks would fall to the ground below the dam to be picked up by sweaty men and women smiling as they work together to make something beautiful, to liberate someone they love, to help the river once again to be wild. It’s hard work, but as we all know, working hard with friends is more fun than any party ever could be. And the work is productive. For the first time in many of their lives, these people are doing work that does not harm but helps the land. Gouges in the dam grow deeper, wider. As people atop the dam stop for breaks, to eat the delicious homemade food brought by others (everything from vegan potato salad to fried free-range chicken to smoked salmon to watermelon to the best watercress sandwiches you’ve ever dreamed of), others jump up eagerly to take their place. Few have ever before experienced this sort of communal coming together, only its toxic mimic at football games, parties, and political rallies. Some sing while they work. Some are silent. Some just grunt with every swing of the heavy sledge.
Finally we reach the water level.
To be honest, I’m not sure what we’d do next. I haven’t done this before. The question is: How do you knock away concrete below water level without getting washed away yourself? I’m sure there are answers. I just don’t know them.
103 If we have a big backhoe or a wrecking ball, we’re still in good shape. We just have to stand aside and knock the damn thing down. If we don’t have access to those infernal machines, then I’m not sure if we should stop and let the river do the rest of the work, or if we should continue to weaken the dam, lower it little by little, until the river rises up to finish its unshackling. But I do know that three or four of us engineers could figure it out pretty quickly. Or maybe not even engineers but just human beings. Or maybe it would be different for every dam, depending on the circumstances (you didn’t think we’d do this only once, did you?). Or maybe some readers will be able to supply—and more importantly, actualize—some answers. It is, after all, a communal project, where we each bring our skills.
I also know that it’s not really a technical problem. Although often presented as such, the primary obstacles to dam removal are almost never technical, any more than the primary obstacles to deconstructing the rest of civilization are primarily technical, any more than the primary obstacles to stopping abusers are primarily technical, any more than the primary obstacles to losing weight or quitting smoking are primarily technical. The primary obstacles are perceptual, emotional, moral, spiritual, inertial.
We would figure it out, and we would remove the dam. Together as a community.
And it wouldn’t cost the state a fucking dime. I’m sure tribes and salmon organizations would cover the costs of gas for people to get there and for food to keep them full.
Which of course is why it won’t happen this way, at least not with state approval. This would accomplish something for the river, for the fish, for the people and communities involved, but it would accomplish nothing for the engineering firms that take in millions to produce neatly bound feasibility studies.
And that, of course, is the point.
I want to nip something in the bud. If you’re a part of the dam removal study industry (emphasis on study, utter lack of emphasis on dam removal) and you want to write to tell me you’re offended by my portrayal of how easy it would be to dismantle a dam (“The sediment, my boy, the sediment!”), don’t give in to the temptation. I may have already heard from one of your colleagues (either publicly, expressing dismay, or privately, expressing solidarity). There is a certain type of dam removal expert more concerned with legalities than living rivers, with science than salmon, with process than justice. These experts plague me like pacifists, cautioning me to be cautious, systematically telling me that the system works if only we’ll let it, that if we just have patience those in power will see the light and remove the dams of their own accord. If you are one of those experts and have made it this far in the book, don’t worry, I’ll address your concerns—or more likely just piss you off more—in the next few pages.
I want to talk about the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Prior to its damming, all five North American species of Pacific salmon ran the river, as well as sea-run cutthroat trout, steelhead, and char. Some of the salmon weighed more than a hundred pounds, the largest salmon ever seen by humans.
104 The lives of the Clallam Indians (as well as many tribes of nonhumans) were centered around the 400,000 salmon who came up the river each year.
Now, about 3,000 fish come up the river annually. The reason? Dams.
The first dam on the Elwha was built by Thomas Aldwell, a Canadian backed by investors from Chicago. Aldwell summed up his relationship to the land in language that well manifests this culture’s collective desires: “There is something about belonging to a place. You want to control more and more of it, directly or indirectly . . . land was something one could work with, change, develop.”
105The dam was illegal. In its very first session, many years earlier, the Washington State Legislature had passed laws prohibiting anyone from blocking fish passage up any river or stream. As David R. Montgomery dryly notes in his extraordinary
King of Fish, “Though the intent of such laws seems clear, they were generally ignored or circumvented in short order.”
106The city of Seattle, for example, dammed the Cedar River in 1901, and “the dam stood in unchallenged violation of state law for over a century.”
107The stated purpose of the Elwha dam was to produce hydroelectricity. Never mind that there were no markets, because what was at stake here was not mere electric power, but heaven on earth. As one article promoting hydroelectricity put it: “Should any considerable portion of that enormous power ultimately be developed and utilized, who will attempt to foretell the innumerable benefits which will accrue therefrom to mankind? It would completely revolutionize economical industrial conditions. The cost of living would be greatly reduced. Not only the necessaries but the luxuries of life would be easily within the reach of the poor as well as of the rich. With the many electrical appliances already invented for the use, convenience, and benefit of mankind, and with the inventions an inventive age will produce for the betterment of humanity, Bellamy’s ideal commonwealth may not be as far in the future as the pessimist might imagine.”
108I suspect however, the real reason for the dam’s construction was that stated by Aldwell. If what you want is to control more and more land, what you’ll do is attempt to control more and more land.
Dam construction began in 1910. By 1911, a Clallam county game warden wrote to the State Fisheries Commissioner, “I have personally searched the Elwha River & Tributarys [
sic], above the dam, & have been unable to find a single salmon. I have visited the Dam several times lately, was out there yesterday and there appears to be thousands of salmon at the foot of the Dam, where they are jumping continually trying to get up the flume. I have watched them very close, and I’m satisfied now, that they cannot get above the dam.”
109I’m not sure why the game warden needed to watch them so close before he could be satisfied. No matter how strong or determined the salmon were, they weren’t going to clear the dam: it’s more than a hundred feet tall.
Fisheries personnel were assured by on-site engineers that a fishway would be built. It should come as no surprise to any of us that the engineers lied.
The response by the state was of course not to demand the illegal structure be torn down—or even that it not be fixed after it failed in heavy rains in 1912.
110 Remember, the property of those higher on the hierarchy is always worth more than the lives of those below. Their solution was to demand that a fish elevator be built that would trap fish at the base of the dam then carry them to the top and release them in the reservoir.
This absurd solution was ignored. A new governor came in, and with him a new fisheries commissioner, Leslie Darwin. Darwin had all the right rhetoric, saying, for example, “It seems to me to be a crime against mankind—against those who are here and the generations yet to follow—to let the great salmon runs of the State of Washington be destroyed at the selfish behest of a few individuals who, in order to enrich themselves, would impoverish the state and destroy a food supply of the people. Unfortunately, every pressure is exerted in behalf of those selfishly interested. These selfish interests have gone to almost unbelievable extent in certain instances in order to silence any opposition in their course, and have slandered and vilified those who opposed their plans and methods. These persons do not want the people of the state to know the truth of the matter, believing that if they do they will act to protect and conserve. It is my belief that had the people understood the situation, they would have acted long ere this, and would have prevented the practical destruction of some of our greatest salmon runs.”
111So he took down the dam, right? Well, no. He did what he decried, and went “to an almost unbelievable extent” to exert pressure “in behalf of those selfishly interested.”
As historian Jeff Crane notes, “Whereas Darwin had elsewhere willingly used dynamite to remove small earthen dams in an effort to enforce the law and restore salmon runs, he was more flexible with such a heavily capitalized project as the Elwha Dam; he struck a deal with a company that had been in violation of the law for five years, years during which the salmon runs were dealt serious harm.”
112He took advantage of a seeming loophole in the law. It was generally illegal to obstruct rivers, but one
could, it seems, block rivers to capture fish to kill and take their eggs for use in fish hatcheries. Here’s how Darwin’s scheme worked, once again according to Crane: “Darwin proposed a clever, pragmatic, and illegal plan. He suggested that by selecting a hatchery site at the base of the dam and making the dam the obstruction for the purpose of collecting eggs for the hatchery, it would be possible to obviate strict enforcement of the fish passageway law . . .”
113In other words, the dam was no longer to be considered a dam, but instead an obstruction to stop fish from moving upstream so they could be captured by the operators of the hatchery, who just happened to be the operators of the dam, which just happened to produce hydroelectricity for sale. It’s still illegal, but that didn’t seem to bother the bureaucrats. It still destroyed the salmon and other fish, but that didn’t seem to bother them, either.
Darwin was so pleased with his idea that he later convinced the state legislature to change the law to allow hatcheries in lieu of fishways. Never mind, once again, that the hatcheries not only didn’t help wild salmon but harmed them.
The whole system is based on lies. So long as someone tells us comforting lies, we will continue to allow them to control more and more of the land and air and water and our genetic materials and everything on the planet.
The lie having completed its purpose, the dam having been built, all pretense of operating a hatchery was dropped in 1922.
Oh, and all that electricity that was supposed to fuel utopia? The dam produced just enough to run a sawmill. The sawmill was used, of course, to deforest the region.
It’s now 2004. For more than seventy years two illegal dams have stood on the Elwha. There is the Elwha Dam and the more than 200-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam (built 1927). For more than seventy years these dams—illegal dams—have killed salmon, shad, steelhead, cutthroat, and other fish.
After decades of outrage and pressure from the Lower Elwha Klallum Tribe (which traces its creation to the Elwha River) and others, in 1992 Congress passed and the President signed a bill authorizing removal of the dams. The dams—illegal dams—were to be purchased from the Virginia-based transnational paper conglomerate James River Corporation (212 pulp and paper facilities in eleven countries, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Scotland, France, Italy, Finland, and Turkey
114). Yet the illegal dams continue to stand because no money was allotted to purchase them.
A major sticking point was that the dams—illegal dams—still provided electricity that was used by the sawmill that was still used to deforest the region. The sawmill is owned by the Japanese-based transnational paper conglomerate Daishowa,
115 infamous for clearcutting the homeland of the Lubicon Cree in Canada.
So, salmon would continue to suffer so that two distant transnational corporations could continue to profit from these structures that had been illegal for more than seventy years. And if this problem were to be solved, American taxpayers would have to pay to purchase these illegal and destructive structures from these transnational corporations.
This is how the system works. This is one reason the planet is being killed.
The dams were finally purchased in 2000.
Demolition was supposed to begin in 2004, but was more recently pushed back to 2007. Presuming deconstruction does begin then, here’s how it’s supposed to work. The larger Glines Canyon Dam should be pretty simple, as engineers cut successive Vs in the concrete, each time slowly lowering the water, until the river is free. Such a straightforward approach won’t, unfortunately, work on the Elwha Dam, because of the way it was patched after failing. Instead engineers will divert the river around the dam, drain the lake (Lake Aldwell), and demolish the dam.
Once the dams are gone it will only take months, according to Brian Winter, former fisheries biologist with the Tribe and now working on dam demolition for the National Park Service, before remnant salmon come home, and begin once again to explore the full length of the Elwha.
116Let’s say you want to take out a big dam. Let’s say you have the full power of the state behind you, which means you don’t have to worry about pesky cops coming to drag you and your trusty sledgehammer away for knocking down this illegal structure. Of course when the structure was put up, the cops were nowhere in the area. In fact the Law Enforcement Officers were probably off arresting protesters who were trying to block access and stop the dam from being illegally built in the first place. We should change cops’ title to Selective Law Enforcement Officers.
117How are you going to bring it down?
There are five major ways the state takes out dams, with the most common by far being the last one.
The first consists of digging around the dam to divert the river, then using heavy equipment to dismantle the dam. An example of this would be the twenty-three foot high and nine-hundred foot long Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine, which was taken down this way in just a few days in 1999.
The second method, usually used on huge earthen dams, is to breach the dam using heavy machinery, and then let the river flow around the rest of the structure, which you allow to remain standing, presumably as a monument to this culture’s arrogance and stupidity. I’m still not sure how you breach a dam with water behind it. I’d like to learn, since this is a relatively inexpensive method.
The third method is an easy one. If you’ve got a barrage-type dam with radial gates, you can just open the gates and pretend the dam isn’t there. Two examples of this would be the Nagara Estuary Dam in Japan and the Pak Mun Dam in Thailand.
The fourth method is the one we’ve all been waiting for: the big blast. Explosives are sometimes used to take out concrete dams. A few examples of this would include dams on the Clearwater (1963), Clyde (1996), Loire (1998), and Kissimmee (2000) rivers. Of course even with explosives it still helps if you’ve got a friend with some heavy equipment.
118The fifth method of dam removal used by those with the full power of the state behind them is the one we’ve come to expect from those who are able to get the full power of the state behind them, which is to do nothing at all. Although they either don’t know or won’t admit it, this is a form of dam removal, too, because eventually every dam will fail. The only question will be what’s left of the river when that finally happens.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how much explosives it takes to knock out a big dam. The answer may make you as happy as it made me. It doesn’t take much at all.
Read that again. It doesn’t take much at all.
Imagine the possibilities!
On February 23rd of this year, a hundred foot breach was blasted into the Embry Dam on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia. The dam was a bit over twenty feet high and nearly eight hundred feet long.
Divers placed explosives, and just a little after noon the signal was given to set them off. Only 10 percent ignited, making a burst of smoke and water but leaving the dam standing. Ninety minutes later they tried again. This time it worked. The river rushed through the broken dam.
All it took was six hundred pounds of explosives.
That’s it.
And that was a pretty big dam.
What are you waiting for?
After the Embry Dam blew, I got an email from someone pointing out to me that the dam was removed by people working within the system. Seventy miles of river were opened to migratory fish such as American and hickory shad, blueback herring, alewife, striped bass, and yellow perch. “See,” he wrote, “the system works!” Never mind that the dam hadn’t produced electricity since the 1960s, so it took forty more years of killing the river to get the dam removed. He ended his note, “Please stop talking about people removing dams on their own. The system works. Trust it.”
I couldn’t believe he actually said that.
I responded, “I am of course happy that the dam is down. I have no problem with working inside the system when it works. That’s preferable,
when it works. The Embry was the second largest dam removed in the United States since the Edwards Dam in Maine in 1999. There are about 75,000 dams over six feet tall just in the United States (about 65,000 over twenty feet tall). There are 365 days in a year. 3652 days in ten years.
119 36,525 days in a hundred years. 73,050 days in two hundred years. If we only take out one dam per day, it will take us about two hundred years to take out all the big dams in the United States. Then we can start on Mexico. Nobody knows how many small dams there are in the United States, which lets you know how out of control
that situation is. The best estimate is about two million.
120 At one per day it would take us almost 5,500 years. Then we can start on Canada. And then Russia. Then China. And so on. If there are two million dams in the United States, I don’t think my math is up to figuring out how many dams there are around the world. But I do know that worldwide, dams have been erected at a rate of about one per hour.
121 The dams need to come down. The dams will come down, and we can do our part. We’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ll make you a deal. You work within the system and I will support you in that work. I’ll help all I can. All I ask in return is that if others choose to work outside the system that you give them the same courtesy and support.”
I didn’t hear back from him.
The good news is that even working within the system dam removals are on the rise. There have been about 120 fairly big dams removed in the United States in the past forty years.
122 The bad news is that at this rate of three per year, it would take about 25,000 years just to get the big dams out of this country, even if no new ones were built. I’m not sure salmon can hang on that long. I’m not sure we can either. The good news is that these numbers greatly underestimate the real total of dams removed. If you include small dams, one guess—and that’s the best we can do is guess—suggests about 600 to 700 dams have been removed these past few years,
123 but that number is probably low. Just in Wisconsin, there have been about 800 or 900 dams abandoned, now waiting for someone to take them out. According to Emily Stanley, a biogeochemist at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, “Dams used to be like stairsteps along rivers, but they have been dismantled or blown out by floods, or the logging industry blew them up when they were done with them. There have been a lot more removals than we realize.”
124 The bad news is that if we’re going to include small dams, then the math gets hairy again as we move to exponential figures, with two million dams needing to be removed: that’s 2 X 10
6 to you nerds out there, or 2E6 to you übernerds.
Now we get to the worse news we knew was coming all along. When people “within the system” talk about removing dams, almost never is it for environmental reasons. Sure, we radicals get to talk all we want about taking out the Elwha (which with its sister the Glines Canyon Dam are the
only large dams scheduled to be removed for purely environmental reasons
125), or the dams on the Lower Snake (which ain’t gonna happen through legal means), or the Edwards, or the Glen Canyon, or Hoover, because we want to see rivers run free. But that’s not why dams get removed.
Why do they get removed? Money. It’s always money. Within this culture, money talks, the environment and everything else walks. Or gets entombed in concrete. Or dies.
Money is of course the primary reason dams are built. The fine, if a tad academic, folks at the World Congress on Dams make clear that all other considerations drop to the wayside: “Pervasive and systematic failure to assess the range of potential negative impacts and implement adequate mitigation, resettlement and development programmes for the displaced, and the failure to account for the consequences of large dams for downstream livelihoods have led to the impoverishment and suffering of millions, giving rise to growing opposition to dams by affected communities worldwide. Since the environmental and social costs of large dams have been poorly accounted for in economic terms, the true profitability of these schemes remains elusive.”
126 In other words, when those at the top of the hierarchy tell you that a dam will be profitable we can guess who (always) profits and who (always) loses.
127 It’s the same old story: the bank accounts of those higher on the hierarchy are worth more than the lives of those below. It is, as always, profits über alles. Here’s how the World Congress on Dams people translate this into language surprisingly spry for still being acceptable within the Ivory Prisons of Academia: “Perhaps of most significance is the fact that social groups bearing the social and environmental costs and risks of large dams, especially the poor, vulnerable and future generations, are often not the same groups that receive the water and electricity services, nor the social and economic benefits from these. Applying a ‘balance sheet’ approach to assess the costs and benefits of large dams, where large inequities exist in the distribution of these costs and benefits, is seen as unacceptable [by some of us, I would add, though certainly not by those in power] given existing [
sic] commitments [
sic] to human rights [
sic] and sustainable [
sic] development [
sic].”
128The next premise of this book is a softer restatement of the eleventh premise, that this culture is a culture of occupation, and that the government is a government of occupation. I’d call it a corollary of number eleven, but I think that even those who shy away from the “o” word will agree with the twentieth premise, which is: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
Having said that I now want to modify it, make it, as happened to the motto above, less catchy but more accurate. First, the economics that drives social decisions is not any sort of real free market economics, where equal partners make equal decisions about transactions that affect them equally. It isn’t any sort of human economics—of which a true free market economics would be one type—where humans make decisions based on human concerns. Rather it is an economics where, as above, the profits of those higher on the hierarchy trump all other considerations and where men (and in this more “feminist” age, women) with guns enforce these transactions over the often-dead bodies of their victims. So let’s modify it to read: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Within this culture money is a stand-in for power, so we’ll modify the premise again: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power—or its stand-in, money—of the decision-makers and those they serve.
But we need to modify it more. As is true for choices made by perpetrators of domestic violence, underlying these social decisions is always an attitude of entitlement. Under this attitude, those higher on the hierarchy are always entitled to dam rivers: the only real basis on which decisions are made is whether those in power deem the action in question worth their while. Obviously. So we need to modify this premise more: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.
Good, huh?
Now, I hate to do this to you, but I think we’ve got to modify it again.
These social decisions so often seem compulsive. A dam every hour? Even if dams were a good idea, don’t you think that’s a bit much? Two million dams in the United States alone? Couldn’t dams, especially in such outrageous numbers, be considered concrete manifestations of a severe psychotic obsession? Wouldn’t you consider it obsessive to kill 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans, 90 percent of the native forests, 90 percent of the native peoples? How about all of the passenger pigeons? We snicker or gasp or mainly feel superior when we read about some hermit living in a house full of newspapers running back to 1947, or saving toenail clippings in labeled and sorted jars of formaldehyde, yet how does each of those compare to these larger obsessions, these larger needs to control one’s surroundings?
You know, the insanity says, there’s just something about land (women, water, power) that makes you want to control more and more of it, directly or indirectly. Land (women, water, power) is something you can work with, change, develop.
Recall premise ten of this book, which is that this culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life. A few years ago I was talking with Ward Churchill about how stupid it was of the Nazis to keep meticulous records of their atrocities, even when these records led at least a few of them to the hangman. He responded, “What do you think GNP is?”
I’d long known that production is the conversion of the living to the dead, but I’d never made the connection that GNP is really nothing more than the sum of these atrocities, with ledger sheets being the enumeration of the awful details. Wall Street was formed as a market for slaves, and now functions as a market in slavery, and a market for futures built on planetary murder.
He continued, “Not only do they have to kill the wild and the people of the wild, but they have to record it all, and they have to do this without acknowledging to themselves that they are making lists of the murdered. So they hide that behind all sorts of fancy financial jargon, so many millions of board feet of timber, so many tons of fish, so many dollars in their bank accounts. But those are records of the dismemberment of the planet. And the accumulation of dollars is, as we both know, just an excuse for the primary destruction.”
So let’s modify it one more time. On a conscious level, social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power—or its stand-in, money—of the decision-makers and those they serve. But these decision-making processes are in fact charades. This of course is known to any member of the public who has ever attempted to participate. It is known to the decision-makers themselves. The charades run deeper, however, than even the “decision-makers” comprehend, because these motivations of increasing power and/or money are not the primary motivations. The primary motivations—lying beneath, unacknowledged, often unperceived—are to control and to destroy. If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.
Given even the conscious motivations driving social decision-making processes—and even moreso the unconscious motivations—it should come as no surprise that the financial concerns of those at the top of the hierarchy determine whether or not—the latter being more likely—dams will be removed through legal channels.
As the authors of one website on dam removal say, “[T]he impetus for dam removal comes not from environmental damage, but from the simple fact that dams are getting long in the tooth: 25 percent of America’s 2 million dams are older than 50 years. Many of these codger dams have problems: They may have cracks. Water may have undermined the foundation. They may be so full of sediment that they cannot store water. They may have been built for a purpose that no longer exists. Or they may endanger swimmers or canoeists, who can get trapped and drown in ‘scour holes’ that appear downstream of dams. The dam-removal process often begins when a state inspector looks at a dam and insists on repairs. These often turn out to cost far more than removal, so repair can only be justified if the dam provides significant economic benefits. If a dam was built, for example, to power a grain mill that is long gone, or is supplying only a small amount of hydroelectricity, who would want to pay a million bucks to keep it going, when it could be ripped out for $50,000 or $100,000?”
129Or as another website devoted to dam removal put it: “Dams are removed for a variety of reasons, but most boil down to economic considerations. Dams have become unsafe (looming structural failures) or ineffective (loss of reservoir capacity through sediment buildup), or the original rationale for their existence has simply disappeared (irrigation for land no longer farmed), and in all these cases the owners have decided that the cost to repair/maintain the dam is no longer worthwhile.”
130Money talks. The environment walks.
Those at the top of the hierarchy make social decisions based—at least consciously—on whether these decisions will increase their power and money.
There are those, however, who make decisions based on different criteria.
