Cracked - The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century's big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation's rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects' main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.

Sommario

Foreword

Chapter 1:       What We Talk About When We Talk About Dams

Chapter 2:       What’s Missing Here: The Snake River Dams

Interlude:        Getting the Garden Back

Chapter 3:       The Future of the Colorado: A Reckoning

Chapter 4:       Safety First 

Chapter 5:       Patience and Perseverance 

Chapter 6:       The Return of the Elwha

Chapter 7:       Dam Removal 101 

Chapter 8:       Patagonia Sin Represas

Chapter 9:       The Blue Heart of Europe

Chapter 10:     Drain Powell First 

Chapter 11:     What Spirits Might Wear in 2050 

Info autore

Steven Hawley is a writer and filmmaker from Hood River, Oregon. He is the writer and co-producer of an award-winning documentary, Dammed to Extinction (2019) and the author of Recovering a Lost River (Beacon Press, 2011.) He’s also a contributor at The Drake, Outlaw, and the Columbia Insight. 

Riassunto

The ugly truth about dams is about to be revealed. 

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the whole messy truth about the legacy of last century’s big dam building binge has come to light. What started out as an arguably good government project has drifted oceans away from that original virtuous intent. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices.

            The estimated 800,000 dams in the world can’t be blamed for destroying the earth’s entire biological inheritance, but they play an outsized role in that destruction. Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World is a kind of speed date with the history of water control -- its dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics and power that evolved with them. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world—growing increasingly arid under the ravages of climate chaos—is well beyond the benefits furnished. Success stories from Patagonia and the Blue Heart of Europe point to a possible future where rivers run free and the earth restores itself. 

Prefazione

FOREWORD 

I’ve been giving voice to the needs of wild salmon and their rivers for four decades. My activism has felt futile in any kind of political sense, but even futile protests prevent impotent rage from reaching toxic levels, and occasionally dissident voices are heard on a level that defies expectation. My 1983 novel, The River Why, bewildered the New York and Boston publishers who rejected it by becoming a Northwest classic that continues to sell by the thousand though the love scene between its fisherman hero and a wild chinook salmon is far more tender than the love scene between the hero and the beautiful young woman he weds. The life of my protagonist helped inspire the creation of dozens of watchdog river and watershed councils, a trend that has since spread nationwide. 

 

My all-time favorite activist project was in 2006, when with Patagonia the company’s help, we launched thirteen river dories in a huge, fresh-harvested Washington wheat field. We peopled the boats with fly fishers, oarsmen, oarswomen, and fishing guides, and rowed our dories and cast our fly rods in the stubble. Our aim was to bring home, in a single image, the fact that the wild salmon and steelhead of the Rocky Mountain West and salmon-dependent orcas of the southern Salish Sea are being driven to extinction by four boondoggle dams on the lower Snake River. 

 

The wheat field’s owner welcomed us as friends because he had known and loved the free-flowing Snake and the farms and orchards that thrived in its riparian zone until they were inundated in the 1960s and ’70s. Four hundred and fifty miles of slack water then began superheating the Columbia and Snake Rivers, stagnating the flow young salmon need to carry them to sea, and stuffing both rivers full of smolt-devouring predator species to negate the incomparable fecundity of a salmon refugia the size of Massachusetts laced with pristine high-elevation spawning rivers and streams. I wrote a prose poem entitled “Lost River” about the salmon tribes decimated by loss of culture, spirituality, wealth, and traditional fishing places. We produced a poster that became a Pacific Northwest icon and raised thousands of dollars for salmon activists. 

 

It pains me to say that, sixteen years later, the wild salmon and steelhead of the interior West are in complete collapse, the salmon-dependent orcas of Southern Puget Sound are blinking out with them, and the bankrupt bureaucracies that wiped them out, Bonneville Power and the Army Corps of Engineers, have just been refunded by Washington State’s “liberal” senators, an act akin to hiring meth cooks to run the nation’s drug rehab programs. 

 

But despite the blundering of malfeasant lobbyists and politicos, it thrills me to add that the most inarguably eloquent and beautifully illustrated testimonial against dams, Cracked, is poised to inspire tremendous change. 

 

Steven Hawley has written, and Patagonia has brilliantly supported, an undamming book powerful beyond anything I thought possible in a time of cynicism, greed, and cave-troll politics. Cracked is itself a mass-breaching of the lies, corruption, and betrayals that have fueled an insane parade of dam-building by disembodied bureaucracies and totalitarian governments worldwide. This book from beginning to end is a tour de force. It affirms Nick Cave’s thesis that a cynic is just an optimist with a crushed heart that can be mended and filled with hope once again. I know this because one such heart, as I read Cracked, was beating in me. 

 

Steven’s final chapter, “What Spirits Might Wear in 2050,” is an apotheosis. Patagonia’s multitude of photographs, charts, and maps are both beautiful and devastatingly powerful. And John Muir’s, David Brower’s, and Steven Hawley’s climactic words carry so much river love that they left me singing the names of the Idaho and eastern Oregon rivers I’ve walked more than a thousand miles, not beside but, in (two dozen pairs of re-soled wading boots my evidence). 

 

Steven and Patagonia have created a masterpiece that will fire generations to do for many rivers what Muir’s long gaze and language are still doing for Yosemite’s fair sister, Hetch Hetchy, and her iconic river, the Tuolumne. We possess, en masse, the power to restore world wonders the dam-building frenzy has temporarily stolen and defiled. Let the return of wonders begin with the energies set free in this river-lovers’ bible. With calm clarity, this book shows us how to judge the value of a dam and begin removing the dangerous and valueless ones. This book reminds us that it is rivers, not reservoirs, that allow natural selection to select naturally and biodiversity to diversify. 

 

This book sees the Earth as our sentient mother; the land, flora, and fauna as her body, clothes, and skin; the seas, lakes, and rivers as her organs, veins, and arteries; and reminds us that her breathing body is a holiness without which we cannot live. This book renews faith that the man, woman, or child who strives to defend Earth’s holiness even in poverty or political impotence, and even against seemingly impossible odds, is not just a hero but an integral part of her, hence every bit as holy as she whom they seek to defend. 

 

– David James Duncan

 

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Steven Hawley, Hawley Steven
• Con la collaborazione di: David James Duncan (Prefazione), Duncan David James (Prefazione)
• Editore: Ingram Publishers Services
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pubblicazione: 02.05.2023
• EAN: 9781938340772
• ISBN: 978-1-938340-77-2
• Illustrazioni: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Categorie: Scienze naturali, medicina, informatica, tecnica > Geoscienze > Geologia; POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy, NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / Rivers, Limnology (inland waters)