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In Kenneth Grahame’s whimsical classic tale, The Wind in the Willows, Mole begins the story entangled in the tedious duties of spring cleaning. But lured by something he could not define, Mole pushes and scratches out of his underground home and finds himself, for the first time in his life, by the river. “All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated.” He meets there with a water rat, who initiates Mole in the lore and life of the river. “And you really live by the river?” Mole, wide-eyed, asks his new companion. “By it and with it and on it and in it,” Rat replies. “What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

Most of us can understand Mole’s raptures, as he leaves a dark and humdrum routine for the surprising natural vivacity of the river. Indeed, as the modern built environment increasingly dominates—“destroying country without making town,” as British architecture critic Ian Nairn memorably put it—such escapes seem more vital than ever. It is easy to spot the urban and suburban accretions of our technological society, from sterile city streets devoid of any connection with their past, to miles of rectangular warehouses where meadow and pond used to be. But these are not the deepest signs of our destructive so-called civilization—instead we will often find its epitome in the very places where we presume to discover its antidote.

Particularly in the last 70 years, many of our rivers, even those free of industrial pollution, have become as artificial and suppressed—purged of their life, form, and function—as a hill levelled for mining or a wood destroyed for a mall. And there is one pre-eminent cause of this devastation: the hydroelectric dam. It gained impetus with a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that proved more consequential than the space race and even predated the Cold War. The two materialistic giants “were locked in a battle of hydroelectric envy,” relates Paul Josephson in Industrialized Nature, “each side touting each successive dam it built as more powerful, requiring more excavation and more concrete.” Since the beginning—with the 1930s completion of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and the Dneprostroi Dam on the Dnieper in eastern Ukraine—thousands of rivers in North America, Europe, and everywhere that the technological view of life has taken hold have been denuded of life by gigantic dams. International Rivers, a group working to preserve the life of rivers, estimates that 60% of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. In many cases, while the passage of water gives the impression of an abiding river, only a dead canal remains.

Hoover Dam / Tupungato / Shutterstock.com

At the root of how this happened—as well as our inability to tell the difference between the husk that remains and the organism it replaced—is our modern amnesia about what a river actually is. “We in the United States have acquiesced to the destruction and degradation of our rivers,” wrote the late river expert, Luna Leopold, “in part because we have insufficient knowledge of the characteristics of rivers and the effects of our actions that alter their form and process.” As is often the case, this was a learned ignorance, built upon the arrogant and detached assumptions of the technological view of life. We turned rivers into what our false objectivity had already conceptually reduced them to: mere channels of water and units of transferrable energy.

This conceptual shift is at the heart of Martin Heidegger’s investigation of technology’s essence in his landmark essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.” While conventional wisdom would simply see an axiomatic goal—the attempt to maximize energy production from the river—being sensibly met through the means of a dam, Heidegger understands that the end is also a cause, since it is a way of looking at nature without which a hydroelectric dam would literally be inconceivable. “Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces,” he explained. The technological mind is compelled to both understand and then requisition all that exists on this basis, pressing upon “nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” What is never asked is whether the thing so ordered and repurposed already has a vital and consequential nature, form, and function which this insistent transformation imperils. Rivers have been reductively re-conceived as a resource at the whim of demands that are unconnected to their existence, and this is the beginning of their destruction.

But is not the hydroelectric dam just a larger version of the smaller mills that had long run with the river currents? Certainly not, Heidegger maintained, for while the mill used to adapt to the river as a supplicant bends to a benefactor, now the roles are reversed. “In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command,” he argued. “The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station.”

You can see the difference clearly in how milldams operated when the emerging Industrial Revolution had not yet smothered more grounded ways. For example, in colonial Massachusetts there remained an old English approach, disappearing at that time from England itself, in which land and river were common responsibilities to be stewarded according to long-term communal life. As Brian Donahue explains in The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord, in 1710, the colony’s legislature “passed an act to prevent nuisances by hedges, weirs, and other encumbrances obstructing the passage of fish in rivers.” Donahue concludes that “well into the eighteenth century, when milldams were small, mostly confined to brooks, and embedded in a legal tradition of tending and husbanding common resources, the volume of fish running in Concord River may even have been on the rise.” Similarly, Theodore Steinberg notes, in Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, after a 1738 complaint about obstructed fish passage, a committee “ruled that the stones knocked down from the dam by ice each winter should not be replaced until the first day of May to allow fish to pass upstream…. To some extent, a reluctance to tamper with the natural flow of the water is apparent here.” What we see, particularly with the giant hydroelectric dams of the twentieth century, is the opposite of such reluctance. What were the consequences for rivers’ nature, form, and function?

More than a channel
“As we were coming down the river today, I could not help thinking of all that water running unchecked down to the sea,” commented Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrat nominee for Vice President in 1920, regarding his trip along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Fifteen years later, then-President Roosevelt declared, in dedicating the dam on the Colorado that we now know by his predecessor’s name, “The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea. Today we translate them into a great national possession.” These were commonplace sentiments, which certainly exemplify the technological mind’s lowering of nature to resources, or, in Heidegger’s term, “standing-reserve,” awaiting conscription into national service. Water not being actively utilized by humans according to abstractly measurable human goals is, according to this view, being wasted. But these comments and the ideas behind them also represent the typical reduction of a river to merely the water that is currently flowing on the surface of its main channel at any given moment. This is a mistake more fundamental than presuming an iceberg to consist of its tip.

A watershed—the interdependent web of tributaries, runoffs, and the land that depends on them—is logically indivisible from the main river of a basin. “All land is part of a watershed or river basin and all is shaped by the water which flows over it and through it,” Patrick McCully points out in his seminal book, Silenced Rivers. Furthermore, even the water in the main channel is only the visible part of the essential groundwater below it. “A river is much more than water flowing to the sea,” McCully emphasizes. “Its ever–shifting bed and banks and the groundwater below, are all integral parts of the river. Even the meadows, forests, marshes and backwaters of its floodplain can be seen as part of a river—and the river as part of them.” Dam builders and promoters ignore both of these realities, with far-reaching consequences. “Nothing alters a river,” McCully summarizes, “as totally as a dam.”

A large dam obstructs and diverts river flow into artificial reservoirs and/or large canals, and in doing so interrupts, alters, and reduces the flow of water down-river from the dam. In the case of dams in which water collects in a reservoir, the contents of which are released at peak intervals through the turbines and beyond, the down-river stretch usually becomes a narrower and deeper river. Where a lateral diversion canal is the primary funnel through which river water powers turbines, such as the Gabčikovo dam in Slovakia, the diverted section of the river is reduced to a trickle. Once we understand that land around and beneath these altered stretches of river is dependent upon and closely interrelated with the river channel and bank, we can easily understand that nothing is left undamaged as a result. As rivers narrow, drop, and deepen following the construction of dams, groundwater is affected.

While groundwater provides overall sustenance to life in river valleys, it also provides a large proportion of drinking water. Less groundwater means that the water table drops. “Nearly 72% of all drinking water consumed in the Danube River Basin is produced from groundwater sources, serving an overall population of some 59 million people…. Surface water and groundwater tend to be highly interconnected,” explains Igor Liska of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River. “When the river surface water level is high, river water infiltrates into the groundwater system. This is especially true during high flows, when both the river and adjoining floodplains and meadows can become flooded. In drier periods, groundwater can help recharge wetlands and even river flows, acting as a buffer and thereby helping to prevent drought.” Down-river alterations caused by dams rob the land above and below of this nourishment, while preventing groundwater from being replenished.

Even though dam-building is often connected with deceptive promises of flood prevention, it is also the case—counterintuitively—that preventing regular flooding is disastrous for life. “Because almost all dams reduce normal flooding,” in McCully’s words, “they also fragment ecosystems by isolating the river from its floodplain.” Speaking again of the part of the Danube Valley in both Slovakia and Hungary affected by the Gabčikovo dam system, campaigner Jaromír Šíbl describes it as having been a “floodplain area which was regularly flooded several times a year,” with numerous side branches flowing into the Danube there. “When there was high water in the old Danube bed, it was equally high in the branches. When there was a flood, the whole area—the islands, the meadows, the forests—were flooded too,” Šíbl continues. “These natural floods produced the whole wide scale of different habitat conditions.” But the diversion canal and other measures to maintain it caused this natural system to shrivel up. “The Danube lost its function as a ‘life pump’ that regularly moistened and drained the riparian [riverside] landscape,” according to Alexander Zinke. “The stabilization of formerly dynamic hydrological and morphological processes led to a continuous degradation, with many forest areas drying, fisheries decreasing, and rare pioneer habitats and species largely disappearing.” To put it simply, the much-heralded “management” of natural rivers slowly kills them.

The Flow and Richness of Rivers
Our words flood and flow come from the same root, and as a river pulses with its naturally produced highs and lows, it self-regulates a precise interplay of water, sediment, and channel, sustaining life as it does so. When dams disrupt the flow of the river (both preventing normal regular flooding and exacerbating irregular flooding), they inevitably hinder the life of the valley and basin. Rivers lose the ability to sustain and spread life. The most obvious sign of this is the slow crawl of dammed rivers. On the Columbia River, FDR’s dream of “utilization” has been implemented to an extraordinary extent. As Blaine Harden notes in A River Lost, following the construction of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia, it “was transformed from America’s largest free-flowing stream into its most elaborately engineered electricity-irrigation-transportation machine,” adding that, “there would be 12 more big dams on the mainstem of the Columbia and more than a hundred others on its tributaries.” As a result, both the middle section of the Columbia River and the Snake River now flow at a “lake-like” one mile per hour. “Before there were dams on the Snake and Columbia, the stream-flow time from Lewiston, Idaho…to the sea was about two days. With dams, it could be as long as two weeks,” Harden writes. Similarly, there are 59 dams on the approximately 600 miles of the upper Danube, from Germany’s Black Forest to Bratislava, often slowing the Nile of Europe to a near-stop.