Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
provided open spaces available for hiking.
20
Throughout this century, reservoirs
became popular for outdoor recreation, swimming and boating, for example. The
multiplication of dams and the grand change of scale in water manipulation
schemes count among the landmarks of the last century
'
s environmental history,
embodying the self-con
dence in technical progress and the human mastership of
art wilderness, after several millennia of traditional modes of dam building (with
earth and rocks). In 2000, the World Commission on Dams counted more than
45,000 large dams on the globe; the scope and scale of dam building in the
twentieth century was unprecedented.
Two purposes mainly motivated the physical reorganization of the environment
they embody:
rstly, the need to provide more water than the natural supply of
streams and rivers could offer, especially when the climate led to great seasonal
variations in rainfall; secondly, in other regions the creation of arti
cial reservoirs
was linked to power-consuming industrialisation, functioning as a water supply
source for hydroelectricity plants. Both grew dramatically after 1945.
21
The world
'
s
total irrigated surface rose
vefold, from 50 million ha at the eve of the twentieth
century to nearly 250 million in 1995, with the fastest expansion taking place after
the Second World War. At the beginning in the Western world, and then in colonies
becoming newly independent nations, a number of rivers have merely become a
series of slack-water ponds, losing many of the physical and ecological charac-
teristics of a stream.
In most cases, dam building could be related to a certain form of bureaucrati-
zation of water management. The process involved vertical schemes of information
diffusion and deprived local people of their traditional way of life, provoking the
upheaval of water usage in affected environments. For social and political histories,
big dam projects can often be associated with a
decision making. This
kind of central planning and manipulation of resources often paved the way for
popular protests.
In Spain, the use of water during the
“
top-down
”
rst half of the twentieth century was
devoted mainly to agriculture. The Franquist regime set up urban and industrial use
as a priority (1950s
1970s). A centralized governance of water resource imposed
the industrialist development model on the entire territory. During the second half
of the twentieth century, after the boom in dam building launched by the Hoover
Dam, outside Las Vegas,
-
projects consisted of big dams and inter basin
rural-to-urban water transfers. They were carried out without any compensation to
rural inhabitants. Social and environmental costs were not taken into account. This
was made following a national central planning. These projects also received
“
pharaonic
”
nancial support and expertise from international agencies like the World Bank and
Western countries such as West Germany or the United States. It is true that
economic development bene
ted the general standard of quality of life in Spain.
However, the industrial and urban model of water allocation created social and
20
Walker (
2007
).
21
McNeill (
2001
).
