Posts Tagged ‘dams’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.
* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!
* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.
* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.
* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.
* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.
* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.
* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.
* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?
* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.
* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.
* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.
* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.
* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.
* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.
* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.
* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.
- Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?
* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.
* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.
* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.
* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.
* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?
* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.
* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.
* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.
* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.
* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.
* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?
* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.
* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.
* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.
* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.
* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.
* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.
* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.
* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.
* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!
* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.
* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.
* The world’s riskiest project.
* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…
* The Oral History of A Different World.
* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.
Surprise Sunday Links! Watch Out!
* The route Google Maps recommends if you’re headed to Ferrum College from the west involves what may be the loneliest and most roller-coaster-like stretch of roadway ever to earn a state route number from Virginia. It’s a narrow ribbon of pavement with no center line, a twisting trail you drive imagining that if you go over the edge, weeks could pass before anyone found the wreckage. Only at the other end do you spot a yellow sign that reads, “GPS Routing Not Advised.” Small, Rural Colleges Grapple With Their Geography.
* A friend recommended the short Cuban SF novel Super Extra Grande to me, which I liked a lot. Some profiles on the author: 1, 2.
* Horrific terror attack at historic Orlando gay night club leaves 20 dead.
* Scientists think they’ve figured out the Antikythera Mechanism.
* In search of Cervantes’s grave.
* Old and busted: AI. New hotness: IA.
* Landscaping in the Anthropocene.
* As an added experiment, the researchers applied their model to the current distribution of human populations on Earth. They found that, under all the same assumptions, 12.5 percent of the global population would be forced to migrate at least 1,000 kilometers, and up to a third of the population would have to move more than 500 kilometers.
* In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history.
…what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.
* Twitter must fix this. Its brand is increasingly defined by excessive harassment.
* More on The 7-1/2-Hour O.J. Simpson Doc Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer.
* Because poetry is considered so small, so irrelevant, it’s tempting for poetry critics to look for the BIG themes in poems to demonstrate that poetry matters. I continue to learn from critics who take on this labor. However, because ALL African literary criticism is assumed to matter the more it focuses on the BIG SOCIOPOLITICOECONOMICDISASTERTHATISAFRICA, I am inclined to turn to quieter moments—spaces for the intimate, the friendly, the quiet, the loving, the depressed, the depressing, grief, and melancholy. I’m drawn to the register that is not the shout, and never the headline. I linger at the quotidian to insist that the African imagination considers livability and shareability.
* For everyone, he claims, is shortchanged when the guiding principle and “key driver” of the institution is no longer thought, but money (ix). Faculty are silenced, yes, by the drive to conformity and homogeneity. But students are also cheated when they are treated simply as “human capital”: “When the university is reduced to the function of preparation for jobs and not for life, life itself gets lost under the jobs” (85). Most broadly and seriously of all, society as a whole suffers as the university abandons its traditional role as “that institution that has a responsibility to counter the incipient violence of natural force” (40). The fate of the university is bound up with the fate of democracy and citizenship at large. If society is to change, and injustice and inequality challenged, we need now more than ever an institution whose role is to be “’critical’ of the existing world state of affairs, dissident with respect to it” (6).
* I sometimes wish tenure were what its enemies believe it is.
* White supremacist PACs and Trump. The stain of Trump. “A GOP senator might vote for Hillary Clinton. Here’s how rare that is.” Trump has underperformed the real estate market by a mere 57% since 1976. Alas, Mitt.
* I’m calling it: Trump will drop out of the race by July 5 at the latest. He will blame the unfair media and political correctness, allude to some wack-ass conspiracy involving Black Lives Matter and/or Hezbollah, and go to his grave telling everyone he knows that if he had stayed in the race, he would’ve beaten Clinton.
* You may be done with your quasi-legal homebrew server, but your quasi-legal homebrew server is not done with you: The FBI has been conducting a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information for months.
* We narrowed Clinton’s vice-presidential possibilities to 27. Now you pick one. For a long time I’ve thought it definitely be one of the Castro brothers, probably Julian, but Elizabeth Warren has made such a push lately I’ve started to think it could actually be her. Of course you can pick Trump’s too, from such a weak field it includes his own daughter.
* Let me close with a broad statement. In the news you will see some rather hysterical statements about how all bets are off this year. That is true to an extent: on the Republican side, the national party’s positions and their rank-and-file voters’ preferences are far out of whack. In a deep sense, their decision process in 2016 became broken. But that does not mean that opinion is unmeasurable. Far from it. In the aggregate, pollsters still do a good job reaching voters. And voters are still people whose opinions move at a certain speed. To my thinking, polls may be the best remaining way to assess what is happening.
* But just in case: I Spent the 90s Fighting Fascists on the Streets of Warsaw.
* If you’re not sick of these yet: What Hamilton Forgets About Hamilton.
* The gentrification of Sesame Street.
* Review: Warcraft Is The Battlefield Earth Of The 21st Century. Warcraft, Hollywood, And The Growing Importance Of China’s Box Office.
* Because you demanded it! Kevin Smith Says That His Mallrats Sequel Will Be a 10-Part TV Series.
* Same joke but for The Passion of the Christ 2.
* Sixty Million Car Bombs: Inside Takata’s Air Bag Crisis: How the company’s failures led to lethal products and the biggest auto recall in history.
* The case for Lady Stoneheart showing up in season six of Game of Thrones. Let me say I have my doubts.
* What to do if you find a goose than lays golden eggs. Machine Learning: A Flowchart. If you read Kafka’s stories backwards, they all make great kids’ movies.
* And the moral cowards at Wikipedia have moved to suppress my work again.
Midweek Links!
* Truly, this is the best of all possible worlds: X-Wing, Tie Fighter Are FINALLY Getting Digital Re-Releases. I don’t meant to brag but I was the very very best in the world at this game, back when.
* CFP at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at UWM. This year’s theme is “the unbearable.” Keynotes by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman!
* How Not to Defend the Liberal Arts.
* Higher Education and the New Brutalism.
We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and cruelty. The United States is sullied by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice. Academics who speak out against corruption and injustice are publicly demeaned and often lose their jobs. At the same time, the Obama administration criminalizes public servants who expose unethical behavior, the violation of civil liberties and corruption.
* Elsewhere in the richest society in the history of the world: How many homeless S.F. schoolkids? Enough to fill 70 classrooms.
* When I was a black woman, I was hated. Now, as a black man, I’m feared.
* Priscilla Wald on Media Treatment of Ebola. How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere.
* Any grad student could have told you: drunk people are better at philosophy.
* Tufts and Unionized Adjuncts.
* Scenes from the competency-based education scam. And the for-profit scam.
* UNC-Chapel Hill Should Lose Accreditation.
* Free education is not a crazy dream; some countries already have it. We should too, or we face a future where the study of literature or art becomes a luxury available to the rich alone.
* Some things mankind was never meant to see. More links below!
* Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day.
* You Can Buy This Abandoned CT Town For Less Than A Brooklyn Apartment.
* 30 Philip K Dick Stories That Should Be Movies.
* Voight-Kampff test for college admissions.
* ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ Is Now an Actual College Class. I’d take that. I know I could teach it.fe
* Someone finally said it: I Don’t Support Feminism If It Means Murdering All Men.
* Yosemite Lifehacks. Recommended.
* There’s no anti-college nonsense so aggressively silly that the Washington Post won’t push it.
* How the culture of assessment fuels academic dishonesty.
* US currency reimagined to celebrate ideas, not the dead. Still more links below!
* The Race to Nowhere In Youth Sports.
* You Can Still Eat This Corgi In Pennsylvania, Thanks To The NRA.
* Krypton TV Series In The Works. The CW Is Making A Young Shakespeare Vs. Witches TV Show.
* But it’s not all terrible ideas: I’m cautiously optimistic about Marvel Phase III. Black Panther! Captain Marvel!
* Halfway through this review of William Gibson’s The Peripheral I broke my no-buying-books rule and bought the book.
* Milwaukee hosts first Fantasticon comic convention.
* The NFL Concussion Settlement Is Pure Evil.
* The end result is always the same. You do all this work just to get money. So fuck it: Why not skip everything and just start making currency?“
* The Dartmouth (America’s Oldest College Newspaper) issues a rare correction.
* Damning every damnable river on Earth: what could possibly go wrong?
* When Russell Brand Met David Graeber.
* Martin Jarvis, professor of music at Charles Darwin University in Australia, claims some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s best-loved works were actually written by his wife.
* And there’s nothing sweet in life: Soda May Age You as Much as Smoking, Study Says.
Sunday Reading, Accept No Imitations
* Timeline of Science Fiction Ideas, Technology and Inventions (sorted by Publication Date).
* Ill-considered, disastrous dam project “has given biologists the opportunity to measure the speed of mammal extinctions.” Well, that’s certainly looking at the glass half-full.
* Decadence watch: Emory University Closes its Visual Arts Department.
* Decadence watch, part two: “The Price Is Right” Airs All-Plinko Episode.
* ‘We Felt Like We Were Above the Law’: How the NCAA Endangers Women.
* Don’t be that dude: Handy tips for the male academic.
* Where Is The Place Of Anger In The University?
Everyday I walk past UC Berkeley’s newly renovated football stadium on my way to drop off my daughter at the Clark Kerr facility for toddlers, and everyday – after picking her up from school – I wait at a bus stop directly across from the same stadium. The stadium, which has put the university 445 million dollars in debt, is just down the street from my daughter’s UC preschool, which is housed in a double-wide trailer and sits on a parking lot in the northwest corner of Clark Kerr Campus. Its interior walls have been removed, and linoleum and carpet patchwork that are no longer contiguous with the layout of the room still show marks of these former walls – in some places adhesive still clings to the floor, marking where one of these walls once stood. This is the facility that we were not granted a tour of – a facility that houses only subsidized children. We do not know where the unsubsidized children receive their care.
* From the Daily Californian: School first, sports second.
* Austerity measures pushes Greek universities to point of collapse.
* America drunk-dials Iran, Iran picks up.
* LOVEINT: How NSA Spies Abused Their Powers to Snoop on Girlfriends, Lovers, and First Dates.
* The update of the damned: Apple’s iOS 7 Causing Motion Sickness And Even Vomiting In Users. This in a device (the iPad) that was originally marketed in part as an accessibility breakthrough.
* The fundamental law of media graph construction.
* A brief history of the Muppets’ very brief stint on Saturday Night Live.
* And a court orders same-sex marriage in my beloved home state of New Jersey. Meet me in a land of hope and dreams.
A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links
* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.
* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.
* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6
* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.
* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.
As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.
* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.
* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.
* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?
* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:
“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”
* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!
* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter.
* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.
* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…
* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.
* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.
* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.
* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.
* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.
* Surveying self-confessed rapists.
* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.
* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.
* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.
* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.
* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.
Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:
“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”
This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…
‘We’re Building Things Based on a Hydrological Lie’
The headline reads, “World’s Dams Unprepared for Climate Change Conditions.”
China and Ecology
So he stands in the village in Guangdong province, where the world’s old motherboards—yours and mine—are sent to die. There, children pick through the old computers, breaking down every reusable part as if they were the globe’s intestine. But the children grow sick with lead poisoning and develop brain damage, cancer, and kidney failure. Even when the kids get to sit in a classroom, they have to wear masks to protect them from the mountains of garbage. Watts goes to meet the environmental activists who are trying to stop this poisoning of their children, and watches as—terrified—they are carried away to prison. (Imagine if Al Gore had been imprisoned for demanding an investigation into Love Canal, and was still in solitary, and you get the idea.)
So he ventures out on a ship with an international band of scientists to save the last Yangtze dolphin—an animal that was swimming through China’s rivers 10 million years before the first human and was a common sight not long ago. But gradually Watts realizes he is too late. They are all dead. He says: “Man had wiped out its first dolphin. … The end of a species after twenty million years felt terrifyingly momentous. This was not just a piece of news. It was even more than history. It was an event on a geological timescale.”
So he watches as the globe warms and China’s deserts stretch further and deeper with each passing year. So he stands and stares as the Himalayan glaciers—where most of Asia’s great rivers begin—melt and die, with two thirds on course to vanish by 2050.
Johann Hari reviews Jonathan Watts’s book When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind—or Destroy It for Slate.
Mostly Non-Health-Care Links
* ACORN will disband as a result of the O’Keefe hoax.
* Via Twitter I see NBC News is reporting (no link yet) that the Senate parliamentarian has rejected the GOP challenge to the health care sidecar. Tough luck guys.
* Arundhati Roy: When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? Does the resistance stand a chance? Should it? Who are the Maoists? Are they just violent nihilists foisting an outdated ideology on tribal people, goading them into a hopeless insurrection? What lessons have they learned from their past experience? Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic? Is the Sandwich Theory—of ‘ordinary’ tribals being caught in the crossfire between the State and the Maoists—an accurate one? Are ‘Maoists’ and ‘Tribals’ two entirely discrete categories as is being made out? Do their interests converge? Have they learned anything from each other? Have they changed each other? Can’t let a link to Roy without a link to her fantastic piece on dams, “The Greater Common Good.”
* “I am chaotic and lazy”: an interview with Magnus Carlsen, the #1 chess player in the world and youngest-ever chess grandmaster. Via Kottke.
* Climate change may be killing the scent of flowers. Two thousand scientists sign letter to Senate demanding climate change action.
* Long profile of David Simon and Treme in The New York Times. Via Occasional Fish, a dissenting view.
* New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves. It was a good idea when Philip K. Dick thought of it and it’s a good idea now!
* And at 81 years old, James Randi has come out of the closet.
Climate Change and Flooding in Netherlands and Bangladesh
In the Guardian, Tahmima Anam returns to her birthplace of Bangladesh to see how it is dealing with rising sea levels.
The facts about climate change in Bangladesh are indeed grim. The country is a low-lying delta, meaning any slight shift in sea levels will cause the land to be slowly swallowed by the waters of the Bay of Bengal. In the next 50 years, 17% of Bangladesh’s landmass is sure to go underwater, causing more than 30 million people to become homeless. Those who live further inland will be only slightly better off: the cyclones and floods that are already a feature of the weather will occur more frequently and with greater ferocity. Geological events stimulated by changes in temperature will mean intense pulses of rainfall followed by periods of drought, and a potential collapse of the monsoon cycle itself. If the sea level rises by 5m (16ft), Dhaka will go under. This is the grim reality that the delegates of the UK/Bangladesh climate change conference, taking place in London next Wednesday, will aim to address. In expectation of the climate change deal that will be struck in Copenhagen next year, it is critical that Bangladesh’s concerns are more widely known and understood.
But I have no intention of sounding the death-knell. I know that people in Bangladesh have, for generations, adapted to the cruelties of nature, and my destination is an example of their tenacity. Deep in the delta, a group of islanders, repeated victims of flooding and river erosion, have found a way to live with their unreliable, unforgiving landscape. The small islands on which they live – forced there because, in a country of 180 million people, every inch of available space has to be used – have an average life span of nine years before they are made uninhabitable. I wonder how these islanders cope with this shifting terrain; how they can bear to know that the place they are living in today may not exist tomorrow. I want to know because more and more people in Bangladesh will suffer the same lot, as the sea creeps up; and because, in the not so distant future, this may be the fate of humanity worldwide.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, a governmental committee has concluded that the Low Country’s system of dykes and dams needs to be dramatically strengthened. (via MeFi)
‘Five Ways to Trigger a Natural Disaster’
Put aside anthropogenic climate change; human action can trigger any number of natural disasters, including earthquakes.
Tremors in the crust beneath the North Sea have become more frequent since oil drilling operations began there, and mining operations are also known to increase the frequency of tremors.
Both drilling and mining redistribute the normal stresses present in rocks, but they are not the biggest cause of man-made earthquakes.
“Dams are the most dangerous man-made structure likely to cause quake,” says David Booth of the British Geological Survey.
By artificially holding a large volume of water in one place, dams increase pressure on fractures beneath the surface of the earth. What’s more, water has a lubricating effect, making it easier for the fractures – or faults – to slip.
More on Dams
That photo below reminds me of one of the best pieces on globalization to be found on the Internet, Arundhati Roy’s essay on dams: “The Greater Common Good.” I must admit I was completely naive about the realities of dam-building before reading this article; dams are actually a tremendously important site for what Marx called primitive accumulation in the contemporary moment and therefore an important location for class struggle.
In the fifty years since Independence, after Nehru’s famous “Dams are the Temples of Modern India” speech (one that he grew to regret in his own lifetime), his footsoldiers threw themselves into the business of building dams with unnatural fervour. Dam-building grew to be equated with Nation-building. Their enthusiasm alone should have been reason enough to make one suspicious. Not only did they build new dams and new irrigation systems, they took control of small, traditional systems that had been managed by village communities for thousands of years, and allowed them to atrophy. To compensate the loss, the Government built more and more dams. Big ones, little ones, tall ones, short ones. The result of its exertions is that India now boasts of being the world’s third largest dam builder. According to the Central Water Commission, we have three thousand six hundred dams that qualify as Big Dams, three thousand three hundred of them built after Independence. One thousand more are under construction. Yet one-fifth of our population – 200 million people – does not have safe drinking water and two-thirds – 600 million – lack basic sanitation.
Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.
Big Dams haven’t really lived up to their role as the monuments of Modern Civilisation, emblems of Man’s ascendancy over Nature. Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt. It’s common knowledge now that Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do – the Local Pain for National Gain myth has been blown wide open.
For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it’s exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides.
The Big Picture
A great new blog from The Boston Globe posts a single striking photograph in large format every day. Here’s the first one: Amazon tribesman riding to protest a controversial dam project.
Gerry Canavan 