Big Dams and their Environmental Impacts

"The cost of building dams is always underestimated--
There's erosion of the delta that the river has created,
There's fertile soil below the dam that's likely to be looted,
And the tangled mat of forest that has got to be uprooted.

There's disappointing yield of fish, beyond the first explosion;
There's silting up, and drawing down, and watershed erosion.
Above the dam the water's lost by shear evaporation;
Below, the river scours, and suffers dangerous alteration."

--Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in The Careless Technology, ed. by M. Taghi Favar and John P. Milton, 1972.

Cracks in the Dams -- "For most of this century, politicians eagerly rushed in, amid cheering crowds, to claim credit for the construction of dams. They built dams for barge traffic, for electricity, for irrigation, for drinking water, for flood control. In America alone, 75,000 dams have been built. But the public is now learning that society has paid a steadily accumulating price for these projects. Fish spawning runs have been destroyed, flows have become nonseasonal, wedges of sediment have piled up behind structures, and delta wetlands have been degraded by a lack of fresh water and by an intrusion of saltwater. Meanwhile, many of the dams have not provided the promised benefits. They were built with taxpayer subsidies, then justified by dubious cost-benefit projections.
That is why on June 17, 1997, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt took the first crack with a sledgehammer to dismantle the first of four dams on the Menominee River flowing between Wisconsin and Michigan. By August 4, 1998, six more had been removed... Active campaigns are now under way to demolish four dams on the Snake River and the Savage Rapids dam in Oregon and to drain the Powell reservoir on the Colorado River to restore Glen Canyon." --Probe Alert, News Brief, October 1998


A few gigantic dams, as wanted by national elites	Many small dams, as needed locally by people

"I am one with thee, and who knows what may avail a crowbar against that Billerica dam?" --Henry David Thoreau, on committing eco-sabotage, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849