The Price of Energy Consumption - The Renaissance of Renewable Energy - page 202

6.5 Hydropower: Transforming Entire Ecosystems
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan's clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess if she is still there
Will marvel at a world so changed
In the above poem, entitled “Swimming”, Mao Zedong expressed his vision of a giant dam
on the Yangtze River (Tvedt 2013 , 202). This megaproject was not realized in his lifetime,
but work began eighteen years after his death, in 1994. When the project was approved,
human rights activists and environmentalists expressed concern about a possible social and
environmental disaster. To make room for the project, 1.2 million people, living in two
cities and 116 towns along the banks of the Yangtze, were forced to relocate with a promise
of plots of land and stipends of US$7 a month as compensation.
According to George Davis, a tropical medicine specialist at George Washington
University Medical Center, as a result of the dam “there's been a lot less rain, a lot more
drought, and the potential for increased disease” (Hvistendahl 2008 ). In 2008 even the
government official in charge of the project admitted that building a massive hydropower
dam in an area that is heavily populated, home to threatened animal and plant species,
and crossed by geologic fault lines may have been a mistake, as it alters entire ecosystems
and may trigger landslides (Hvistendahl 2008 ) . Other major dam projects, such as Egypt's
Aswan Dam and India's Sardar Sarovar Dam, also involved huge forced population
movements. In most cases, the dislocated populations ended up in slums (McNeill 2000 ) .
There have been several notable dam failures in history. The most catastrophic was the
bursting of the Banqiao Dam in China in 1975, killing an estimated 171,000 people and
displacing 11 million others. To this day, dam failures are a regular occurrence, though
thanks to safety improvements and more accurate geological surveys, human casualties are
usually measured in tens rather than thousands.
Today about 800,000 dams operate worldwide, 45,000 of which are taller than 15
metres. The benefits of dams extend beyond the generation of clean electricity. They may
also control flooding; their reservoirs provide a reliable supply of water for irrigation,
drinking, and recreation; and, by stabilizing river flow, some dams boost navigation and
trade (Marks 2007 ).