The Highest Motive
5/2/24 – The future of dams and hydropower
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated collection of Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
While wondering how I’d pick up the thread of last week’s writing on dams and hydropower, a post arrived from Rod MacIver and his always-beautiful
. The post, “Wild Waters and the Tao,” offers up one of those Taoist proverbs that remind you to take a deep breath and see the world as it is: The highest motive in life is to be like water.
It fights nothing or no one.
It flows from and back to its source and in the flowing smooths and wears away
all resistance.This is an ocean planet, and water is the great leveler, bringing down mountains as easily as it soothes my mind. Water is both mystery and solvent, inviting awe and eroding grief.
There’s much more to be said about this wisdom (and the Taoists have spent several centuries saying it), but for my purposes here I’ll simply note that while rock resists and deflects water, it cannot wear it down. Water always wins. This is both philosophical and observable. As we look back in time, as from the rim of the Grand Canyon, there’s a fair amount of evidence of the erasure of stone. More recently, I saw a footlocker-sized piece of granite stranded in the middle of a seaside tennis court after high seas rearranged the Maine coast.
I’m happy to report that after spending a few centuries building millions of dams across the downstream motives of rivers, we’ve begun, in some places, to help the water win. In the U.S., the most notable example right now is the removal of four large dams on the Klamath River in Oregon, bringing back to life 15 miles of drowned habitat and restoring 400 miles of river to salmon and other migratory species. “Never,” says American Rivers, “have four dams of this size been removed at once.” The work entails an equally large and complex shoreline restoration effort, including a tribal-led program to replant “2,200 acres of formerly submerged lakebed, along with several miles of tributary creeks” with about 100 species of native shrubs, flowers, and trees. All four dams will be removed by the end of 2024.
According to a comprehensive database kept by the nonprofit American Rivers, 2119 dams have been removed from U.S. waters since 1912. This isn’t a lot, considering the nearly 92,000 inventoried dams (and perhaps a few hundred thousand other barriers) in the country, but American Rivers has big plans to build alliances and change policies in order to achieve 30,000 dam removals by 2050. The process has been accelerating. 80 dams came down in 2023 (including the first of the four Klamath dams), restoring and reconnecting 1160 river miles. Some of this was funded by the Biden administration’s farsighted and far-reaching Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
And in Europe, where 1.2 million barriers (150,000 of them already declared obsolete) obstruct the flow of rivers, momentum for removal is growing. 487 dams were removed from European waters in 2023, and many more are planned. Much of this activity will be mandated if the EU’s Nature Restoration Law passes its final hurdles, with a goal to restore 25,000 km of river habitat by 2030.
The timing is right. In the U.S. and Europe, especially, an astonishing number of dams are old, dangerous, unnecessary, and too expensive to replace. The average age of a dam in the U.S. is 61 years, and nearly 70% of the nation’s dams were built before 1973. About 30% have been determined to pose high risk to human life and/or significant risk for extreme property damage. Which means that thousands of old dams are high-hazard threats to whoever lives downstream of them, threats that will require tens of billions of dollars to repair or replace.
This may seem like an infrastructure discussion, but really this is water, wearing down all resistance.
In the U.S. west, where water is more political than philosophical, and more trapped than free, dams are as much a signature of the Anthropocene as barbed wire. Ben Goldfarb in Eager (his excellent book about beavers) describes many western dams as “aging blights that were follies from the moment their foundations were poured.” He cites Marc Reisner’s essential book, Cadillac Desert, to describe “most major dams… as pork-barrel boondoggles that spent billions of public dollars to achieve mere millions in private irrigation benefits.” Reisner, looking at the big picture, wrote that as billions of federal dollars poured in for these river-killing boondoggles, “the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.”
I don’t have the space here to delve into the corruption, costs, and questionable calculations that may lurk behind the rush to build large dams around the globe in recent decades, but often there is reason to doubt their rationale, especially now that there are energy sources (wind and solar, especially) that are cheaper, faster-to-build, and less environmentally destructive. Even in 2014, though, a study determined that large dam projects around the world “will be too costly in absolute terms and take too long to build to deliver a positive risk-adjusted return…” (For those wanting to dig deeper, International Rivers has tagged some of its articles with “Dam Corruption.”)
Some of the largest new dam projects, meanwhile, are creating permanent international conflicts. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Addis Ababa on the Blue Nile could generate 6000 megawatts of electricity for tens of millions of Ethiopians, but Egypt and Sudan are fighting Ethiopia over concerns about the flow of the Nile, especially in times of drought. China, which has been on a mega-dam building frenzy, now controls the flow of the Mekong, which also feeds the lives of 60 million people in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. China is accused of both restricting water even when it was receiving plenty of rainfall, and releasing huge unannounced bursts of water that drowned crops and damaged fisheries.
Meanwhile, huge hydro projects continue to devastate Indigenous and other traditional communities. This is as true in newer Chinese-funded projects (on the Mekong, in the Philippines, etc.) and in Brazil as it has been for a century in the U.S., and Canada.
All of this is (part of) the human rationale for dam removal and for a moratorium on new dams. The ecological rationale is even better. As I wrote last week, the extraordinary environmental harm caused by millions of dams has turned much of the cool flowing lifeblood of continents into hot, diminished, isolated fragments. Extinctions and threats to freshwater biodiversity have been far greater than in any other ecosystems.
Unlike the soot-spewing, atmosphere-heating impacts of fossil-fueled power plants, the ecological harm from dams is localized, but when dams are everywhere so is the harm. In Europe and North America, in fact, we’ve pretty much run out of good places to site large hydro projects. As Anthropocene explains, “Switzerland has already dammed 88% of its suitable rivers, with Mexico, Norway, Sweden and France close behind.” Which also means that not much free-flowing natural habitat remains.
It’s worth pausing to remember the stark contrasts between human dam-making and the work of beavers. Those miraculous rodents build diversity into landscapes, like the remarkable keystone species that they are. Whereas, at this weird stage of our history, humans are more of a headstone species, killing landscapes for selfish purposes. This is true even at the end of a dam’s life, when their reservoirs fill in with silt. For example, half of the dams run by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are reaching the end of their “sediment design life.” Ben Goldfarb reminds us that
When beaver ponds fill in with sediment, they become meadows; when vast reservoirs do it, they become bowls of shallow, turbid soup, incapable of spinning turbines or sustaining aquatic life.
And, of course, many problems with dams are intensified in a hotter world, making hydroelectric power an increasingly bad bet. This starts in the mountains, where the “white coal” of snow and glacial ice is rapidly disappearing, removing the steady supply of stored precipitation from the hydro equation. Hydroelectric generation from snow run-off in the Alps has dropped considerably already. Dams, like the rest of us, will have to rely on the unpredictable rainfall of a hotter atmosphere.
Droughts and floods are becoming more extreme. A hotter atmosphere is more chaotic, holding and/or releasing greater amounts of precipitation. New large-scale, less predictable weather patterns are emerging. A 2022 study from the World Wildlife Federation found that by 2050, “61 percent of all global hydropower dams will be in basins with very high or extreme risk for droughts, floods or both,” and that “1 in 5 existing hydropower dams will be in high flood risk areas because of climate change, up from 1 in 25 today.”
International Rivers explains that droughts have already “crippled hydropower generation all over the world, leading to energy rationing and blackouts from the U.S. to China, and from Brazil to southern Africa,” and that “increasingly common extreme weather events make large dams dangerous for people living downstream, as they become vulnerable to dam failures.” Just this week, NPR article describes how drought in South America is crippling hydropower production in Columbia and Ecuador.
Part of the problem, as Bloomberg reports, is that new hydro projects have been designed according to climate models that are no longer relevant.
Climate chaos is also a problem for the dams built for flood control or to provide regular irrigation and drinking water. Extreme floods threaten to blow out barriers, while droughts turn dams into dry, useless walls. Look at Lake Powell, long vital to water management in the West, now chronically underfilled after two decades of drought and at risk of failing to provide drinking water to 40 million people.
And Lake Powell and Lake Mead, like other huge reservoirs in a hotter world, are evaporating more of their stored water than before. Reservoirs in the Colorado River basin are losing an estimated 10% of their volume to evaporation, about the same as the river’s entire annual flow. Powell and Mead lose roughly the same amount of water they provide to Utah and Nevada for farms and people. Globally, evaporation from reservoirs nearly equals all the water consumed by the world’s cities. That’s a huge loss that wouldn’t occur in free-flowing rivers.
The benefits of hydroelectric dams in the Anthropocene have long been called into question. This “10 Reasons why hydropower is a false climate solution” article from International Rivers makes a strong case. Methane from decomposing vegetation bubbles up from the world’s reservoirs in such great quantity that it equals the greenhouse gas footprint of Canada. This is worse in the tropics, where emissions “can exceed those of fossil fuel for decades,” one study found. Building new hydro dams will spike methane output just as we’re trying to draw down emissions. Solar, wind, and geothermal power generation are faster, cheaper, and less ecologically harmful to build. They are, in a word, sustainable, while new hydropower is not.
Moreover, the path forward in the Anthropocene must be marked by solutions that alleviate both the biodiversity and climate crises wherever possible. There is no painless way to do any of this, but not building new dams seems like an easy way to pick some low-hanging fruit. Free-flowing rivers actually sequester carbon, while dams make the problem worse. Healthy river systems support life, while dams deprive us of it.
The good news is that the world seems to have reached “peak dam,” as this excellent Yale e360 article outlines: “Construction of large dams globally fell from a late-1970s peak of about 1,500 a year to around 50 a year in 2020.” Even China, which has driven much of 21st century dam construction, has hit the brakes on hydro investment. Hydropower has become too expensive, too harmful, and too controversial in a world looking to save itself from itself.
So, what is the future of dams and hydropower? We can start with the three Rs: “rehabilitate some for safety; retrofit some for power; and remove some for conservation.” That’s the catchphrase that emerged from the remarkable agreement, Climate Change, River Conservation, Hydropower and Public Safety, facilitated by Stanford and led by American Rivers and the National Hydropower Association. This dialogue between long-time adversaries turned into an in-depth $63 billion infrastructure investment plan which, with strong political support, secured more than $2.3 billion for the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The three Rs – rehabilitate, retrofit, and remove – reflect a fundamental truth. In this time of enormous and rapid transition, decisions on energy and biodiversity need to be made quickly, ethically, and pragmatically. Dealing with climate chaos can make strange bedfellows. In this case, anti-hydro activists acknowledge that given the need to decarbonize immediately, maintaining existing hydroelectric sources and retrofitting some other dams to generate power makes sense, as long as those dams are in good shape and not squatting on particularly vital habitat. And hydropower companies recognize that tearing down obsolete, expensive, and unsafe dams is a smart decision in a world that needs its rivers back.
The Times cites an example of this ethical pragmatism here in Maine, on the Penobscot River,
where environmentalists, energy companies and the Penobscot Indian Nation reached a landmark agreement in 2004 to upgrade several dams in the river basin while raising money to remove two other dams that had blocked fish from migrating inland for more than a century. The result: The hydropower companies on the Penobscot ended up producing at least as much clean electricity as before, while endangered Atlantic salmon have returned to the rivers.
What this all means is that the powers that be need to have an adult conversation about dams one by one: where they are, what their purpose is (if any), what state they’re in and how expensive a repair/retrofit would be, and how the ecological cost of their existence compares to their benefits to the human enterprise. And that conversation, I’m happy to say, has been underway for some years now.
To the extent that we “need” more hydropower, the executive director of the Low Impact Hydro Institute has an excellent two-part answer: “One, there’s potential for more hydropower at existing dams. And two, there is no need to build a new dam.” She’s quoted in a Yale e360 article that explores the retrofitting story, which also quotes a spokesperson for the National Hydropower Association who admits how much has changed: “The era of building big dams is essentially over,” he said, “so our focus as the industry is … to develop on what’s out there.”
Beyond dam removal and retrofitting, there are other pragmatic solutions entering the conversation. New turbine designs allow more fish to pass through, upgraded fish ladders make dams less of an obstacle, adaptive reservoir release optimizes water temperature for downstream species, new weather forecasting strategies help dam managers decide when to storage or release water in a hotter, weirder climate, and pumped hydro is a relatively new method of drawing power from falling water that isn’t necessarily part of a river system.
We need to let water win wherever possible. That starts by choosing not to erect new dams, and by finding our highest motives in preserving and restoring the living world. A lovely, important example of this just happened in Chile, per the Times, but the calculus is trickier in areas of the world with less developed energy systems as they look to ramp up their grids with renewables. Only 5% of likely hydropower sites in Asia and Africa have been utilized, which makes the temptations of white coal harder to resist. Much depends on what money is available for hydro vs. solar, wind, or other clean energy.
It occurs to me that the activists who have been working on dam removal or the reduction of dams’ impacts, often for decades, are like water. They are relentless but with the highest motive: to let rivers be free. If you’re interested in this work, check out American Rivers, International Rivers, Rivers Without Boundaries, and the Low Impact Hydro Institute, which certifies hydropower facilities that have taken steps to reduce their harms.
The beautiful truth is that rivers begin to recover the moment a dam comes down. We saw it here on the Penobscot, and the folks in Oregon will see it soon on the Klamath. In Glen Canyon, the sacred site drowned beneath Lake Powell, the megadrought has invited life back in and invited us, as Zak Podmore writes, to “start thinking of Glen Canyon not just as a national recreation area, but as a national restoration area.” (The Hoover and Glen Canyon dams won’t come down anytime soon, but the time will come when water wears them down too.) American Rivers has a useful report on the ecology of dam removal. All the life that has been denied movement – upstream or downstream – soon arrives to continue the ancient passages from sea to stream to land, and back again, in a cycle as foreign to a dam as a flower is to a rifle.
So I’ll close here in the spirit of that restoration, with a note that May 25th, 2024 is World Fish Migration Day. The Nature Conservancy has a good explainer about the importance of migratory fish and the challenges they face. Better yet, here’s a very short video of alewives making their spring migration up the Nemasket River in Middleboro, MA, courtesy of Eric Aldrich/TNC.
I began with the Tao, and so will end with the Tao. Here is another proverb – thanks again to Heron Dance – this one from Kuan-Tzu:
Water is the source of creation, the ancestor of all living things. It is the bloodstream of the Earth.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Anthropocene, good news in conservation. The first global assessment of the effectiveness of conservation work finds that most efforts are making significant differences in protecting wildlife and slowing or reversing declines. There are so many different types of conservation work, from habitat restoration to removal of invasives to creating protected reserves, and more. Results vary, but the big takeaway is that conservation works. What it needs is more funding.
Also from Anthropocene, a remarkable story that may reveal an even more remarkable truth, that environmental restoration can be a tool for political peace-making. Thanks to the many years of relentless hard work of conservationists, the pelicans of Lake Prespa, on the border between Greece, North Macedonia, and Albania, have become a symbol of how nations can work through political differences when they find a shared love of natural heritage and the beauty of life.
From Hakai, the little-known and little-understood population collapse of muskrats in North America. Muskrats are an underrated architect of wetland habitats – muskrats maintain what beavers build – but they depend on wetlands, which have disappeared or been degraded across the continent. No one knows why muskrats have been on a steep decline for decades. There are several partial explanations – habitat loss, dams, chemical contamination, etc. – but no good answers. As the well-written article explains, “the declines could be understood not as the consequence of any one issue but the result of a world made inhospitable by humans.”
Also from Hakai, an important and heartening victory for Indigenous land rights in British Columbia, where the Haida Nation has won full ownership of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago of more than 200 forested islands covering 10,000 square kilometers (3861 sq miles) that they have stewarded for at least 13,000 years.
From
at , an excellent description of environmental problems as perfect examples of a “Moloch Trap,” i.e. a zero-sum game in which everyone competes for the same resource even while knowing that the competition will make everyone worse off. These are, she notes, “classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ situations.” Here’s one example:We deplete groundwater resources to irrigate our farms despite knowing that it will soon run out. If we don’t do it, someone else will, so we might as well make some money from what’s left while it’s still available.
From Civil Eats, good news on U.S. nutrition standards for school meals. Limits on added sugar are important, but more exciting is a new rule allowing school districts to prioritize “locally grown, locally raised, or locally caught,” when ordering unprocessed or minimally processed food. This goes into effect July 1st.
Learn from the Environment Working Group shopper’s guides all you can about the presence of pesticides (or the lack thereof) in store-bought produce. EWG also provides news and data on tap water, sunscreens, PFAS, and more.
From Canary Media, the Biden administration (via the EPA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders announced a $7 billion launch of the Solar for All grant program, providing financial assistance to every state, Puerto Rico, and six tribes for the build-out of solar for low-income households. Solar for All is one of three initiatives of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is part of the much larger expenditures of the Inflation Reduction Act meant to move the nation in a more rational direction.
In related news, check out
’s excellent (and subscribe) for, among a lot of other great news, a summary of all the astonishing new climate action from the Biden administration. As Sam writes, if you read nothing else just peruse this White House press release for a sense of the tremendous scale and scope of the Biden administration’s most recent efforts to transform the energy landscape.From Quanta, an announcement on the likely existence of animal consciousness from a group of biologists and philosophers. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness is brief and fairly conservative, but it builds on the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness with new studies and findings. (To give you a sense of what I think about all this, I wonder sometimes if there are conferences of other species asking the same questions about us.)
As always, a super-interesting, deeply researched piece. But I cannot help but sigh. What is never discussed in mainstream commentary is the underlying cause of all this: what makes us a headstone species rather than a keystone species, as you mention. There's the very seldom challenged creed of more when we could be happy with less. These quotes from the Tao Te Ching are important - and I think we should all read the entire thing and change the way we live accordingly.
"Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
Nice Jason. 'Water is soft and supple and yet can wash away mountains' - Tao. I read a decent book in the early 2000s by a environmentalist (forgot names) who was so passionate and ready to literally take up arms to bring down dams - in particular was the Klamath - which was where he was from I believe. Anyway, I hope he is still alive to see this finally has happened - albeit 20 years later!