Taming Rivers, the Genesis

Taming Rivers, the Genesis

For eons, rivers began their treks to the oceans as trickles in the highlands of their watersheds. Making their way down via braided streams, they descended ardently and unimpeded into torrents. Six thousand years ago, however, man began a centuries long quest to tame rivers. From that moment in Mesopotamia when the first dam was constructed on the Euphrates River, man has worked with vigor to “tame” rivers by channeling, obstructing, barricading and damming them.

At no time in history was this truer than in the Twentieth Century. During that one hundred year period, man – in the guise of engineer - was engaged in an epic struggle with Mother Nature in order to vanquish and subjugate her. This battle to construct a “wholesale transformation of natural environments” that produced electricity and water to nourish urban expansion, as well as, the construction of modern cities, went hand in hand with the fabrication of nature. This tendency however did not arise in the last century; it only reached its zenith then. Worldwide only short and limited stretches of rivers run wild today. Previously, free flowing rivers across the planet were tamed by an estimated 840,000 dams, including some 40,000 large dams whose four story plus (15 meters) heights loom out across the landscape.

Indeed, man’s modernist propensity to subdue and tame nature has fostered a pursuit for control over her. Numerous scholars have described this penchant as “Modernity’s Promethean Project.” Prometheus was acknowledged as the father of the arts and sciences in ancient Greece. Twenty centuries later, during the Age of Enlightenment, both Scientist and Engineer were accorded Prometheus’ mythological status, assuming his mantle of eminence as a modern “Cultural Icon” and “Modern Hero.”

From Edward Teller’s “scientific horror” created by the power of nuclear weapons, to the cataclysm of Katrina caused by the Army Corps of Engineers shattered promise to protect New Orleans from category 5 hurricanes, “the heroes of modernity promised to dominate nature and deliver human emancipation employing imagination, creativity, ingenuity, romantic heroic attitude, and a touch of hubris against the given order of the world.”

A number of scholars conceptualize these two processes as part of one single development, “the urbanization of nature”. Nevertheless, despite the catalytic impact that dam projects have upon the modern and rural landscape and their effect on the socio-environmental fabric, their impact has received little scrutiny in the natural resources law literature.
Today, dams exemplify humankind’s propensity to urbanize or tame nature –or more correctly, mankind’s new power to control nature. Moreover, in the modern era, dams are viewed as the great concrete cathedrals of the American West. Indeed, this would not have surprised the renowned Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer.

He firmly believed in the connection between the exploitation of nature and human beings. Modern capitalist societies, Horkheimer felt, had lost their bearing, their sense of reason. They were intent on domination for the sake of domination, on dominating nature, man, and whatever else they could think. Out went moral reasoning, and in came a crusading urge to manipulate and exploit. Whatever sacred value was once attached to the natural world was stamped out by the instrumentalism and calculation of expert engineers and others engaged in an irrational quest to conquer and subdue. But little of this crosses the mind of the average visitor on a trip to Hoover Dam, or any other dam for that matter.

In fact, during his term as Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, noted that “[m] any of these dams have become monuments, expected to last forever.” Americans and visitors from abroad visit “dams like the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River or the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River” like modern pilgrims to a holy shrine, albeit a concrete one. They are awe-struck and reverential “at the dramatic evidence before them of the newfound power to control [rivers specifically and] nature [in general].” But at what cost?

This is a nascent subject, one that has not been addressed in the legal literature for at least twenty years: an assessment of the costs that dams have exacted in terms of natural resources, including wetlands, fish, and endangered species, among others. The next section, entitled America and the Age of Dams, traces the dam construction frenzy that gripped the United States for over fifty years. As in so many fields, the rest of the world has followed the United States lead in constructing dams. The shear cost of the “concrete jungle” in the wilderness viz a viz the destruction of the Colorado River Delta, and its attendant resources.