Читать книгу Adventures in the Anthropocene - Gaia Vince - Страница 13
ОглавлениеWater that falls from the sky, leaks from a lake, rises from a spring or melts out of a glacier will make its way from land to ocean in a river. These freshwater conduits are life-giving. They irrigate forests and meadows, create wetlands and deltas, transport nutrients and sediments, and nurture entire ecosystems – self-contained watery worlds of animals, plants and microorganisms.
And yet, rivers owe their very existence to life forms. For billions of years, terrestrial fresh water flowed to the oceans in vastly broad, shallow sheets – like floods – across the planet’s hard barren surface. It took the arrival on land of root-based plants, around 420 million years ago, for rivers to evolve. Plant roots weakened the surface of rocks, making them crumble, producing mud that eroded channels through which water then coursed. The plants’ strong root systems then further channelled the water, strengthening the muddy banks and creating a deeper, meandering path that we would recognise as a river. As these proto-rivers flooded and receded, sediments were periodically dumped, creating deeper, richer soils where huge woody plants took root. Forests diversified and enhanced the channels, helping produce the vital network of wetlands that exists today.
The world’s rivers drain nearly 75% of Earth’s land surface, from the icy polar regions to the steamy tropics. Although they hold only about 0.0001% of the world’s water (and less than one-third of all fresh water), rivers are a key part of the global hydrological cycle, describing the geography of accessible fresh water for plants and animals. Hundreds of thousands of species have evolved to rely for all or part of their lifecycles on freshwater bodies, from the trickling source of a mountain stream, the torrential violence of waterfalls and rapids, the calm deep waters that flow between riparian forests, to the wide-open, sediment-flooded wetlands and deltas.
The rejuvenating flow of Earth’s powerful arteries appears timeless. Dinosaurs lived and died on riverbanks that exist today. They fed on fish, some of which – such as sturgeon and gars, and the arowana and arapaima of the Amazon – still swim the rivers. These ancient creatures are joined by a vast array of newer fish, reptiles, mammals, birds and insects that contribute to making freshwater ecosystems some of the world’s most diverse.
Humans have also been a part of this ecosystem, relying almost exclusively on rivers and lakes for drinking, bathing, food, waste disposal and transport. Fresh water is so essential to humans that you can map society by it. River deltas have proved fertile culturally as well as agriculturally – the great religions have rivers as gods, such as the Ganges, or as important parts of their narrative, such as Moses’ journey on the Nile, or Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan. Historically, cities were built in fertile river valleys and at river mouths. Agricultural run-off of sediment, water and nutrients created rich coastal deltas that could support greater food production. This and the good maritime and river connections for trade and transport made deltas ideal places to live. Human civilisation was born on a riverbank. The Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Nile spawned humankind’s first great experiments in urban living, shifting our species firmly on to the trajectory we have followed ever since.
In the Anthropocene, humanity is draining the world’s rivers and other sources of fresh water. Climate change has altered the global water cycle from Holocene norms, intensifying evaporation and precipitation. There is now greater flooding, worsening droughts and a general loss of predictability that makes planning more difficult for people trying to adapt. Greater water extractions by humans for agriculture, industry and energy mean that many rivers have dried up, while others are now too polluted to use.
Of all the ways we’ve engineered Earth in the Anthropocene, little rivals our audacious planetary-wide replumbing of the world’s waterways. We have straightened and diverted them, buried them, dammed them and drained them for irrigation, filled or emptied them of fish, dug their beds for construction materials, used their flows to drive turbines for hydropower, and even created our own canals to bridge cities and divide continents. Humans now control more than two-thirds of the world’s fresh water. We’ve captured so much water that we’ve redistributed its weight around the world and the globe now spins a fraction slower.
In the past century, we have drained half of the world’s wetlands, built 48,000 large dams and diverted most of the world’s large rivers – only 12% still run freely now from source to sea.1 Major rivers, such as Mexico’s Rio Grande, China’s Yellow River and Australia’s Murray River, frequently no longer reach the sea. Inland seas, such as the Aral or Lake Chad, have dried up with the use for agriculture of their feeder rivers. Dams, diversions and extractions are preventing river sediments from flowing downstream to maintain deltas against erosion. That, combined with groundwater extraction in coastal cities, is causing two-thirds of major deltas to sink.2 Around a quarter of people rely on groundwater that is being extracted faster than it is being replenished, more than 800 million have no safe drinking water at all, while four in five of us live in a place where the water supply is at risk.3 It’s not just humans that get thirsty, all species need water, and ecosystems around the world are suffering from a decline in supply – 30% of freshwater species are now endangered, the highest proportion of any ecosystem.4
And our demands on the planet’s rivers are growing ever greater. Despite all the ways we’ve cosseted ourselves in the Anthropocene against the hazards and unpredictability of the natural world, we remain desperately dependent on rivers for drinking, for agriculture, for fisheries and, increasingly, for our energy.
In many ways, the Anthropocene will be shaped by how we manage our rivers – it’s already proving emotive and political territory in different parts of the world.
The southernmost habitable region of our planet is an untamed wilderness of glaciers and mountain peaks, subantarctic forest and scrub desert, volcanoes and turquoise lakes. Home to condors, puma and blue whales, Patagonia is the tail end of the Americas, one of the last accessible nowhere lands on Earth and the jumping-off point for Antarctica. It contains the Southern Ice Field, the world’s most important reserve of fresh water after Antarctica and Greenland. Forests of Antarctic beech bear testimony to a time when these lands were part of the warm Gondwana supercontinent, while frequent earthquakes and fiery volcanoes are evidence of continuing geological movement.
This extraordinary landscape is the focus of a bitter international battle over plans to build a cluster of hydroelectric dams on three of Chile’s mightiest rivers. It is an issue so divisive, it is tearing apart some of the country’s biggest corporations and risks unseating the president. I went there in the hope of learning whether in the Anthropocene, people will choose the promise of cheap electricity and associated economic development, or the preservation of a natural wilderness that few will ever visit.
Deep in the heart of Patagonia, I find the churning glacial blue of Chile’s most voluminous river, the Baker. The river cuts fast and furious through the mountains here, a tumultuous pulse that roars in defiance of any checks or dams. It is wild, wet and loud. Rainbows flash in the spray and the rocky banks glisten in the wash. I fancy I hear bird call drowned out in the background, but I cannot be sure. Beyond the surging river, all is still and silent. Two large hydroelectric dams are planned for the Baker – a cacophony of concrete, steel and asphalt to tap the river’s immense natural power for city-dwelling humans thousands of kilometres away. I try to picture my surroundings submerged beneath a reservoir, imagine an access road, and the bustle of a large human workforce in this remote location . . . and fail.
Patagonia is desolate. Its very emptiness is part of its charm and it has always drawn those escaping society. Butch Cassidy and his gang sought refuge in these wastelands, as did a variety of Soviet defectors, Welsh Christians and English fortune-seekers. It’s a rainless, inhospitable place, incessantly windy and freezing cold. But the skies are vast, the austral light is incredible and the rocky desert is a palette of extraordinary colours.
Above me soar enormous black condors seeking death in the dusty grasses. In the absence of trees, other birds of prey sit on the road, leaving it until the last moment before taking off in front of my wheels. I see guanacos (a type of llama) and a black and white skunk as I drive for hour upon hour. The desert rolls on in valleys created by glaciers, and the expanse is strewn with large incongruous boulders, called ‘erratics’ because they don’t belong to this rocky ground. They were dragged down from the mountains and dumped here by ancient glaciers.
After almost a day of driving through the vast bleakness, I am relieved to see a sign of human habitation. Poplar trees struggle to protect a lone house, standing small-windowed against the chill. It is one of the region’s estancias – ranches set up by those who pioneered these lands nearly a century ago, clearing the rocks and natives to profit from a booming wool industry. Further on, I come across a bubbling carpet of sheep, herded by gauchos on horseback and their dogs. The scene looks timeless and utterly natural, and yet it’s an illusion – sheep were only introduced to the country in the late nineteenth century.
Eventually, I reach Coyhaique, capital of the Aysén region of Patagonia. In rolling hills at the foot of a basalt massif, it is a compact, ordered town whose folk live mainly by fishing and cattle ranching. For many, life is not dramatically different from that experienced by the pioneers; but graffiti around town reveals a new disquiet. ‘Patagonia Sin Represas!’ (‘Patagonia Without Dams!’) is perhaps the politest of the slogans, reflecting anger over plans for the Baker River, and for several further dams on the untamed Cuervo and Pascua rivers.
Like most hydropower, the energy would be produced by building up a head of stored water behind a dam that can be released in powerful bursts past turbines to generate electricity. To convert the relatively shallow river flows of the Baker and Pascua into deep energy stores means creating reservoirs, and together the dams would flood 6,000 hectares of land. But the biggest opposition is reserved for the accompanying electrical transmission line. Some 6,000 pylons, towering as much as eighty-five metres high, will transport the direct current 2,450 kilometres north to Santiago, Chile’s capital, and on to the energy-hungry mines in the desert beyond. The electricity line alone will require one of the world’s biggest clear-cuttings, a 120-metre-wide corridor through ancient forests, fragmenting the ecosystems en route.
Critics say the dams, pylons and transmission line would destroy forever a true wilderness for short-term energy gains; proponents argue that hydroelectricity is a clean source of energy, that Chile needs the 3,500 megawatts per year of power to meet its development goals of becoming South America’s first developed nation by 2018 and, lacking oil or coal reserves, has no viable alternative.
The country needs to triple its installed capacity by 2025 to meet its energy requirements – currently half the nation’s electricity comes from hydropower and the other half from imported fossil fuels. The Patagonian dams alone could generate one-third of Chile’s electricity, which surely makes the sacrifice of a few remote rivers a small price to pay for such bountiful energy? However, those opposing the dams argue that Chile has one of the longest coastlines in the world, 7,000 kilometres, which is ideal for wind, wave or tidal energy projects; 10% of the world’s volcanoes, so plenty of geothermal potential; one of the world’s strongest solar-energy zones in the Atacama Desert, all of which could provide energy more locally to its point of use without disturbing pristine Patagonia. Confused, I consult an energy expert.
Claudio Zaror, a chemical engineer and energy advisor to the government, is a quietly spoken, slight man who endured the worst of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Kidnapped by the secret police in his twenties, tortured and held for years in a cell sixty centimetres square, he was a lucky ‘disappeared’ – he survived. After decades of deprivation, he wants the lives of ordinary Chileans to improve and has little patience for what he considers unnecessary sentimentality over some remote rivers. For Claudio, the issue is clear-cut: ‘We are a developing nation with nearly 20% of the population living in extreme poverty – I want that number to reduce and we need energy for that.’
Every year the country needs an extra 500 megawatt installed capacity – another 8% annually – because of an increase in population, consumption and industrial growth, Claudio says. ‘If it doesn’t come from the Patagonian dams, it will have to come from a fossil-fuel source with all the carbon emissions that entails, because other renewable energy sources are prohibitively expensive. Environmentally and economically, hydropower is our only feasible option,’ he says.
Climate change is bringing new urgency to the situation, Claudio adds, because droughts are becoming more frequent and severe across the central region, where most of the nation’s hydropower comes from. ‘During the 2008–9 drought, less than 15% of the base-load was met by hydro and we had to import diesel for the power plants at $118 per barrel.’ Meanwhile, with 92% of the country’s glaciers retreating owing to climate change, the glacier melt means there would be strong river flow in Patagonia for the short to medium term.
However, the dams issue remains divisive, not just in Aysén, but across the nation. Surveys show more than half the population is against the proposed dams, but the gap is small enough to cause the government problems whichever decision it takes. The controversy has spilled internationally, as people from around the world claim a stake in this globally unique wilderness. Even the venerable New York Times has waded in with an editorial calling for the dam proposals to be scrapped.
Over the last century, humans have built the equivalent of a dam a day – the vast majority since 1950. Two-thirds of the world’s major rivers have now been disrupted with more than 50,000 large dams – there are more than 85,000 dams in the US alone, stoppering large and small rivers and in most cases utterly transforming natural flow. The most famous of these, the Hoover Dam, constructed in the 1930s, is largely responsible for killing the mighty Colorado River before it reaches the ocean. With a 40% increase in global hydropower predicted by 2050, humanity in the Anthropocene has designs on most major rivers, and controversy over how to use these planetary arteries is only set to increase. In Europe and North America, most of the hydropower potential has now been exploited – indeed some dams are being removed and rivers ‘renaturalised’. In Africa, Asia and South America, though, hundreds of hydrodams are being planned to provide essential electricity for some of the world’s poorest people, and in some of the most ecologically important environments from Patagonia to the Amazon to the Congo. However, the people receiving the new electricity are usually not the same people faced with losing their environment, livelihoods and homes.
Globally, hydropower is an attractive low-carbon source of energy, which unlike solar or wind can produce a continual supply of electricity no matter the weather. Around 20% of electricity worldwide already comes from hydropower. The infrastructure can be relatively inexpensive, is 80–90% efficient and comes with its own battery: the reservoir. This is such a good device that solar- and wind-power generators are increasingly looking to use ‘pumped hydro’ to store their surplus electricity, using it to pump water high up to a reservoir for release when the sun doesn’t shine or there’s no wind. Dammed reservoirs are, of course, also a great way of storing water for drought and modulating damaging floods.
Yet dams, for all their attractive benefits, are also saddled with a lot of negative impacts. Creating the reservoir often involves flooding fertile land, sometimes displacing thousands of people. Communities may lose their land, houses and culturally important sites such as ancestral burial grounds or a landscape that carries strong meaning for them. If the area to be flooded is not adequately cleared of vegetation, methane – a greenhouse gas with twenty-five times the warming potential (over a century) of carbon dioxide – will be released from rotting material. Nearly a quarter of humanity’s methane emissions come from big dams. Stalling a river in a reservoir allows some vegetation to build up and rot anyway, which can poison the water for fish.
The weight of so much water can also cause earthquakes, leading to dam breaches and catastrophic loss of life. In other instances, heavy rains can leave dam managers with the dilemma of whether to try to hold the waters back but risk bursting the expensive dam walls, or releasing the flow, risking flooding people downstream. In many cases, the flow has been released with devastating consequences for lives and livelihoods. In this way, dams that are intended to mitigate flooding can actually result in more serious sudden deluges.
Downstream of a dam, natural seasonal floods that revitalise wetlands and fertilise paddy fields cease. The flow may be so reduced that farmers cannot irrigate their fields and streams are no longer navigable. Migratory fish are often prevented from reaching their spawning areas, other fish have reduced vegetation and may be split from their breeding populations, affecting ecosystems and fisheries. And dams are a barrier to sediment flows. Instead of being flushed downriver, sediments get backed up against the dam walls, which damages the turbines and causes the reservoir level
to increase over time. Downstream, though, the effects of losing nutrient-rich sediments is far more problematic. The fertility of the entire system can be impacted, with soils lost during seasonal rains not being replaced. The upstream–downstream demands often straddle national borders leading to conflict over precious water.
However, the economic benefits can be huge, and the new reservoir can be a haven for wildlife, such as birds, or provide new fisheries and much-needed irrigation security. The Aswan Dam on Egypt’s Nile, for example, was highly controversial when it was built in the 1960s. Yet for all the environmental damage it wreaked on the downstream river system, you’d be hard pushed to find an Egyptian that advocates its removal – the dam has been an outstanding economic success, bringing improved harvests from better irrigation despite drought conditions, as well as hydropower and flood protection worth billions of dollars. Even there though, the river is contested. In 2013, Ethiopia voted to strip Egypt of its right to the majority of the Nile, the source of nearly all of Egypt’s water, paving the way for construction of a massive hydropower dam on the Sudanese border.
As with many development opportunities, hydrodams can be constructed in a way that is minimally socially and environmentally invasive, or in the cheapest way to make the fastest possible return on investment.
In August 2008, HidroAysén, the company behind five of the Patagonian dams, submitted its environmental-impact assessment to the Chilean environmental agency for regulatory approval. The thirty-two government departments charged with assessing the report found it so wanting that the company was instructed to address more than 3,000 comments and given a nine-month extension to do so. In October 2009, HidroAysén submitted its response in a 5,000-page addenda document that once again fell short of public-agency requirements, more than half of the departments making highly critical comments. These included criticisms that the environmental-impact assessment contained a lack of data on seismic risks in an area known for earthquakes and volcanoes, total unaccountability of glacial lake outburst floods, lack of data on impacts to key natural habitats in and outside of national parks, local communities, biosphere reserves of global importance, wetlands and aquifers.
However, with the two powerful companies behind the projects – HidroAysén and XSTRATA – enjoying the backing of Chile’s right-wing president, Sebastian Piñera, plans for the dams have rolled on undaunted. Over the past few years, the plans have been approved, appealed, thrown out, reappealed, reapproved, and so on.
I’m in Coyhaique to track down architect and keen mountaineer Peter Hartmann, who is the regional head of CODEFF (Chilean Friends of the Earth), one of the main groups opposing the dams. We meet in a busy café, where Peter picks me out immediately, unfurling his long thin body to lollop over, arms outstretched in greeting. In the booming flat tones of the partially deaf, he invites me to stay with him. ‘We’ll chat there,’ he says, waving away the waitress’s offer of menus.
We set off along a dirt track that worsens as it rises up the mountains above the town until I am thrown crazily from side to side as the truck negotiates increasingly deep ruts. But it’s worth the journey. Peter’s home turns out to be a beautifully crafted wooden house with a grass roof and windows that glow in the sun, reflecting the city below and an incredible rock colossus above. Over a shared maté – the South American herbal infusion sipped hot through a metal straw from a small gourd – Peter describes his many objections to the dam projects, from his concerns about ecosystem destruction to the visual disturbance of having intrusive power lines running through the unspoiled mountains and valleys he cherishes. ‘You are used to seeing electricity pylons and cables everywhere where you live, so you don’t realise how ugly they are and how they ruin a landscape,’ he says. ‘But here, we don’t have big artificial structures interrupting the natural view. It’s one of the last places on Earth like this and I want to keep it that way.’
Peter, who is helping lead the offensive against the dams, is a charming, generous and endlessly fascinating host. He provides me with an entertaining history of the area while he prepares a stew for our lunch from indigenous vegetables including tasty lilac-coloured potatoes, known locally as ‘meca de gato’ (‘cat shit’) for their undeniably similar shape. Peter is one of Chile’s very few vegetarians.
His passion for the area comes from decades of intimate knowledge. He has climbed its mountains and rock faces, navigated its freezing rapids and defended it against polluting industry and unsightly infrastructure. Large areas of valley and slopes around Coyhaique still bear the scars of the first European inhabitants. Arriving just decades ago, fleeing conflict in Argentina or seeking grazing lands from elsewhere in Chile, these cattle herders caused unimaginable destruction in their quest for arable soils beneath the jungles of Aysén. Lacking the resources or the will to clear the forests by axe, they simply set fire to it. Some 4 million hectares – half of Patagonia’s forests – were destroyed in the 1940s and 50s in the world’s biggest fires, which raged uncontrollably, fuelled by the dry timbers and the tinder-like flowers of the native bamboo plants. The devastation is still evident: graveyards of uncleared, un-decomposed trees lie where they fell. The thin soils, no longer secured with tree roots, and made weaker with the hooves of non-native sheep and cattle, simply pour off the mountains, silting up the rivers, reducing the limited arable land further. The once mighty port of Aysén, now silted to less than a metre deep in places, is no longer usable and a new port had to be built at Chacabuco. People in Coyhaique whisper confessions: ‘I personally burned several acres.’
Where cattle don’t graze, the forests have recovered. ‘We must learn from these mistakes we made in the past and not add to our destruction with megadam projects,’ Peter says. ‘Our proposal is to keep this unique, unspoilt region as a living reserve instead of destroying it like other parts of the world.’
Persuasive as his argument is, I want to understand what has spurred so many first-time protesters to take to the streets over these dams. We head off in Peter’s ageing Chevy, passing incredible vistas of high mountains and gushing streams. Deciduous trees in every shade of yellow and red cover the higher slopes, while evergreens occupy the lower. We hunt out rock paintings made by the few indigenous nomads that passed through this region and search in vain for the huemal, an endangered native deer and the Chilean national symbol.
We stop at a straw-bale house owned by Francisco Vio, a tourism entrepreneur. His home heating and electricity is powered entirely by solar panels with propane back-up for the winter months, when he gets just four hours of sun a day because he is in the shadow of a large mountain. Inside, the house is cosy and well insulated against the cold in a region where most people live in corrugated iron or timber shacks with barely a barrier against the freezing conditions. Wood for burning is cheap – a truckload, which lasts a month, is just $80, and although this represents a third of the minimum-wage salary, it is still cheaper than the initial outlay for insulation. Francisco is campaigning against the dam project alongside Peter. He first came to the region in 1986 as a hitchhiker from Santiago, fell in love with it and resolved to return and live here with his family. ‘What does development really mean?’ he asks me as he bounces his toddler on his knees. ‘Does it have to be a lifestyle where you consume more, create more trash, destroy the natural areas that give you a sense of well-being and make living worthwhile? We don’t need so much more electricity to develop as a nation. There is another way.’
Opposition to the dams is based on an aesthetic, the idea of wilderness that cannot be replicated – an idea of untouched nature. Like everywhere on Earth, the influence of humans is already here in the sheep, cattle and burned forests. But in the Anthropocene, when so many wild places have been so dramatically altered, the idea of Patagonia is of increasing value to many. And while environmental activists like Peter may not hold many cards in government circles, wealthy landowners do.
Peter drives the battered truck into the grounds of a handsome estancia. Sergio de Amesti, an agricultural engineer turned cattle farmer, manages some 3,000 hectares in the Simpson Valley, the most valuable and productive arable land in a region where 85% of the ground is rocky mountain or glaciers. The planned transmission line would run right through his land. Amesti was the regional secretary for the ministry of agriculture under Pinochet’s regime – just the sort of private-enterprise-minded character that the government might have counted on to be in favour of the dam project. But Amesti is not. ‘The main selling point of my meat is that the cattle are reared in a pure, idyllic region – uncontaminated, unpolluted, noise-free and visually pure. Huge pylons would destroy that image and lower the value of my meat and land,’ he says.
I meet other locals in a worse predicament, including a visibly angry beekeeper, Gabriella Loshner, one of around 200 people whose homes will be flooded by the new reservoirs. Compared to other megadam projects around the world, it is a tiny population – the relatively low social cost of the Patagonian dams is something that the project’s supporters, including government ministers, repeatedly emphasise. (‘There’s no one and nothing there,’ more than one bemused minister has declared about Patagonia.) By comparison, the Three Gorges Dam in China displaced 1.2 million people and flooded thirteen cities, 140 towns and 1,350 villages. Brazil’s proposed dam at Belo Monte in the Amazon would displace 20,000 people, many of them from indigenous tribes. And hydroelectric dams planned on the Mekong in Laos would affect millions of people in the river basin and delta.
Other Aysén residents are campaigning on behalf of non-human creatures threatened by the proposed dams, including huemal deer, native fish otters and unique cold-water corals at the river’s outlet. During the last glacial period, 10,000–20,000 years ago, the river reversed its direction of flow from the Atlantic to the Pacific, an historical quirk that infused the Baker River system with unique biodiversity. Unlike rivers to its north and south, the Baker contains an endemic population of fish, such as members of a primitive catfish genus and Odentethes hatcheri, a type of silverside.
Dams on the Baker will prevent fish migration, and even the subtle alteration of nutrients can have far-reaching effects, says Brian Reid, an energetic American limnologist (someone that studies fresh waters), who we visit at the Patagonia Ecosystem Research Centre in Coyhaique. ‘Damming a river turns it into a lake and completely alters its function,’ he explains. Brian is interested in the river’s silica levels, which are an important component of diatoms, a major group of planktonic algae that support a large ecosystem. If the levels of silica go down compared to the levels of nitrates, another group of algae called flagellates are favoured, which are responsible for toxic oceanic ‘red tides’. Diatoms are larger than flagellates, so animals can feed on them more efficiently, making the whole system more productive.
Brian fears that dams on the Baker River could significantly alter the silica levels downstream. ‘Damming of catchments across Europe has resulted in so much particulate trapping that it has reduced silica levels in the Baltic and Black seas. Production and efficiency of marine organisms there has gone down and it has affected fisheries.’ The head of the Baker River is a pro-glacial lake, producing significant levels of silica. ‘I row the river in a raft when I’m sampling, and you can hear the turbidity, the tiny velocities that keep everything in suspension – it sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies,’ Brian says. If it is dammed, it will result in a warmer reservoir that would be more productive, but a loss of suspended sediments flowing to the ocean.
No system on Earth is ever truly isolated from another, which is why the human changes we make to even small parts of the planet can have such enormous consequences. Building a hydroelectric dam hundreds of kilometres inland can affect cod numbers far out at sea. In the Anthropocene, our Earth-changing capabilities are more sophisticated than ever, but we have barely begun to comprehend the complexity of our impact. Until now, this has meant that we address each eventuality as it occurs, in a cascade of reactions to each action. But, as scientists get better at modelling the outcomes of our various interventions, we should be able to fine-tune our geoengineering to benefit people and ecosystems.
The way that many hydrodams operate, for example, has an unnecessary impact on wetland ecosystems. So-called ‘hydropeaking’ – flooding and draining a reservoir in artificial daily pulses – can be devastating for fish. The dramatic rise and fall of water levels during dam releases – sometimes of several metres – is too extreme for plants and animals to cope with, resulting in dead zones around the shores of reservoirs. Fish that lay their eggs in the shallows among submerged tree roots, for example, may find a few hours later that those sites are high and dry with the eggs desiccated, sometimes with the loss of an entire species. Most dams use hydropeaking because it’s most profitable, releasing most energy at the peak of demand. A less damaging option is a run-of-river design which, instead of relying on a head of water to build up in a big reservoir behind a dam wall, simply allows natural river flow to drive the turbines. Run-of-river dams don’t disturb the upstream ecosystem because no reservoir is created, they don’t get silted up, and they don’t result in the abrupt upstream–downstream temperature difference you can get when a reservoir is drained from its lowest (coldest) layers. They are only suitable where a river has significant drop, which the Cuervo has, prompting campaigners to call for the dam company XSTRATA to change its dam plans there.
But the Cuervo plan has bigger problems. The proposed dam lies directly above the Liquiñe–Ofqui fault line, on a triple point where the Nazca, South American and Antarctic tectonic plates meet. It means that there is a likelihood of a volcano or earthquake at the site, and yet there has been no study to investigate this, Peter says. In 2007, one month after XSTRATA submitted its report declaring the siting to be on a seismically inactive zone, the area experienced a massive earthquake that dislodged boulders into the fjord below, triggering a tidal wave that killed people on the opposite bank. ‘The government threw out their report,’ Peter laughs. Earthquakes have wrought considerable damage at dam sites around the world, including in April 2010, when a quake at Yushu in China’s Qinghai province killed tens of thousands of people in minutes. The Yushu reservoir, sited on a seismic zone, may actually have triggered the quake due to the weight of the water on the underlying geology. In the Anthropocene, humanity’s dam-building is shaking the Earth.
There are other dangers too. Patagonia is one of the fastest-melting glacial regions in the world, which has already resulted in catastrophic outburst floods, debris-laden torrents carrying away entire forests. At times, these glacial floods have caused the Baker to rise by four metres and even turn around and run upstream for days at a time. ‘They are preparing to construct dams on what is probably the most unstable river system on the planet,’ Peter says, flinging his arms incredulously.
Back in town, I visit the offices of dam company HidroAysén. Veronika, an earnest and sweet-natured woman, is adamant that the dams would rescue local people from poverty by providing much-needed employment and helping development in the region. I press her on this vague ‘development’ term, and she describes how she was one of the fortunate few who escaped from her isolated village for a year’s education in Puerto Montt, a small city further north. ‘Most people here have no choices. There are not many restaurants or shopping malls or decent education opportunities,’ she says. ‘It is very difficult even to get to the next village because the roads can be very bad and impassable, especially in winter.’ Dam-building requires improvements to the roads and surrounding infrastructure, and shops, restaurants and other services will be built to serve the workers, she reasons.
Her colleague, Rodrigo, is also in favour of the dams because he sees them as the only viable energy option for Chile. In 2009, reliance on Argentinian gas led to disaster when a domestic crisis there created a fuel shortage and the country cut Chile off. ‘We can’t rely on another country to provide our energy,’ Rodrigo says. The energy-security argument is one the dam company is focusing on in an orchestrated PR campaign that includes television advertisements threatening catastrophe if the project is blocked. One shows the lights going out mid-surgery in an operating theatre.
After repeated back-and-forth between HidroAysén, XSTRATA and the government, and seven court appeals on environmental grounds, Chile’s supreme court ruled in favour of the dams in April 2012. Only the transmission line awaited approval.
But astonishingly, one by one, the project’s backers have begun pulling out, bowing to public pressure. President Piñera’s own ratings plummeted after he publicly supported the dams following massive – occasionally violent – protests against them. Chile’s second biggest bank, BBVA, announced it would not be assisting HidroAysén with loans for the project, citing environmental and social concerns. And then, in December 2012, Colbun, the big Chilean energy company, announced it was selling its 49% stake in HidroAysén. In December 2013, Chile elected the left-wing president Michelle Bachelet, who has spoken out against the dams. For the first time, the $10 billion megaproject looked on shaky ground.
The battle is far from over, though. Electricity rates on the central grid have risen by 75% in six years, straining pockets and the economy, especially in energy-intensive mining operations north of the desert. With Chile relying on copper for as much as one-third of the national income, the spectre of cheaper hydropower from the south will not vanish soon.
Unlike other megadam projects around the world, the Patagonian proposals are not primarily of humanitarian concern. But they do raise fundamental questions about what we really mean by sustainable development in the poor world, and clean energy in the Anthropocene, and what price we are willing to pay as a global community to preserve unique areas of our planet.
If the transmission line gets the go-ahead in Patagonia, electricity production could begin as early as 2015. If not, Chile will be one of the few developing countries to choose to protect its natural environment over short-term financial gain.
It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening in poorer, one-party Laos.
In the steamy hills of South East Asia’s Golden Triangle, on the Thai–Burmese border, I take a slow boat into tropical Laos, beginning a journey along the Mekong River that will end 2,600 kilometres downstream in the South China Sea. The Mekong is the planet’s twelfth longest river and one of its richest biodiversity sites, supporting over 1,300 varieties of fish and the world’s biggest inland fishing industry. The river basin is home to some 60 million people in six nations, who depend on it for food, water and transport. It couldn’t be more different to Patagonia’s Baker River, yet, here too are highly contentious plans to dam the river for hydropower. As we enter the Anthropocene, the Mekong has become the most visible focus of international debate over the future of the world’s great rivers.
The boat is wooden, flat-bottomed and broad enough for two rows of hard benches to run its length. We cut a winding route through hills and mountains draped in lush vegetation. Vines and creepers extend down from the canopy, cloaking the forest in a continuous verdant blanket from bank to peak. The river is interrupted by oily granite and limestone karsts that protrude from the banks and out of the water in peaks that mirror the larger green ones. From some of these rocky outcrops, bamboo canes point over the water. Fishermen from indiscernible villages haul in nets or wade through the water in swimming pants to catch something silver and fast that flashes beneath.
The mighty Mekong is narrow and shallow here, sucked dry on its journey from its source in the Tibetan Plateau, 4,500 metres higher in the Himalayan snows, through China’s Yunnan province – until recently a region of such unspoilt beauty that Shangri-La was said to have been located there. The upstream extractions water China’s wheat baskets and the country is growing thirstier every year. China has constructed several hydrodams on its portion of the Mekong, both for power and water storage. The remote Xiaowan Dam, completed in 2008, which at almost 300 metres high is the world’s tallest, holds a reservoir some 170 kilometres long, and sends power all the way to Shanghai.
In some places the water appears to be boiling, bubbling up with unseen rocks. China intends to quell these rapids, blasting them with dynamite and streamlining the Mekong so that it is navigable all the way to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It has busted a stretch north of Thailand, but protests there put off their projects south – for now.
We pull up at banks occasionally, where a village is hinted at by far-off stilted houses growing out of the forest. Local people come aboard carrying baskets of fish and vegetables or live chickens – the boat transport is the only link many of these rural people have to life and markets beyond their village. Almost all of the country’s 6.5 million inhabitants live on the Mekong or its tributaries. At one spot, a woman tries to board with two large monitor lizards and a big dead rodent on a string. The boat becomes uncomfortably crowded.
We glide though Luang Prabang, once the shimmering capital of the kingdom of Laos. French colonial villas, with painted shutters and verandas that hang with bougainvillea are interspersed with gold stupas and richly decorated Buddhist wats. Orange-robed monks with tranquil faces weave through the sleepy town. Officially it is a city, but with just 100,000 inhabitants, it scarcely merits the insult.
Above me, slash-and-burn scars denude the mountain slopes. It is a traditional but very destructive farming technique, in which forests are chopped and burned to make agricultural land. It leads to ruinous soil erosion and high carbon emissions, and it is one of the reasons for the success of opium in these parts – the poppies survive poorer soil compared to other crops. Opium use, traditionally practised by several tribes here, was manipulated by every colonial power across Asia. Now, the global opium industry is almost entirely in Afghanistan; nevertheless, I am offered it on several occasions.
Laos is on the list of least-developed nations. One reason for this is the cluster bombs littering the country that make it tricky to plough a field or build a road without painstaking and expensive mines clearance. One-third of the 2 million tonnes of bombs dropped on Laos during nearly 600,000 US missions during the Secret War in the late 1960s failed to detonate. More than forty years later, the bombs continue to kill and maim people especially during the sowing season when they are triggered by farmers turning the soil. The number of casualties is increasing, particularly among children who are seeking out the orange-sized bombs, because of the lucrative new market for scrap metal in China. Another hindrance to development is the Communist government, which after 1975 saw 10% of the population flee the country or be interned in re-education camps. Those who left were primarily the educated, middle-class intellectuals, a migration that cost the country a generation in development time, while its neighbours Thailand, Vietnam and China spent those years playing rapid catch-up to the established Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan). The vast majority of Lao live at subsistence level, fishing the rivers of the landlocked country or rice farming across its spine and plains. What forest remains is an essential source of food and other materials for the largely rural people, half of whom don’t have electricity. Their livelihoods are further threatened by unfair compulsory land purchase, in which the government pays little compensation for taking land from families for infrastructure projects or in corrupt deals with wealthy people or businesses. It has become such a contentious issue that even the state-controlled media reports it.
Laos has long nurtured aspirations of becoming the battery of South East Asia. With the majority of the Mekong’s waters gushing down its length, it has unrivalled hydropower potential. It was the French who first dreamed of taming the Mekong – at the turn of the twentieth century it took longer to travel from Saigon to Luang Prabang than to Paris. But their attempts at railways, rapid-busting and canals came to nothing. A few decades later, international companies flocked to Laos with new plans for hydrodams down the length of the Mekong that would transform the country and hasten its development. War and political conflict put paid to that idea.
Until now. Eleven hydroelectric dams are at advanced planning stage on the untamed Mekong River. The Communist government promises electricity and the other riches of development for the people of this poor nation, but the environmental and social consequences of stifling this uniquely biodiverse river are potentially enormous. While the government sells off the country’s natural resources from river to forest, reaping quick profits from electricity sales, rubber plantations, timber and mining, the people of Laos are in danger of losing everything.
A few days further downstream, past the charmingly petite capital of Vientiane, I stop in the small town of Thakek, surrounded by striking limestone karsts and protected forests. The animals here are shy, mainly because they are still hunted and eaten, so I see few. Forest-harvesting villagers pass me with assorted edibles in their baskets, including mushrooms, snails, insects, squirrels and a Mekong River weed that they dry. They munch on red ants and I try one – it pops in a citrussy burst in my mouth. I set out to rent a good off-road bike, ending up with a 100 cc scooter with a broken petrol gauge and speedo. I get a new inner tube for the rear tyre, get pumped and head out of Thakek on a three-hour voyage into the jungle, following a tributary river back from its Mekong entry in the hills. I pass fields being prepared for rice planting, fat black and pink buffalo wallowing happily in ponds and muddy pools, children firing stones from slingshots, and women in sarongs breastfeeding. Road-building, that ubiquitous Anthropocene signature, is under way even here. In a few years, the boat trip I made will be obsolete or maintained only for tourists. A 1,500-kilometre road from the Burmese port of Mawlamyaing, via Thailand and Laos to Danang in Vietnam, is almost complete. Already, journeys which used to take two weeks by sea between Bangkok and Hanoi now take only three days overland. The new ‘east–west economic corridor’ will change Laos rapidly, spurring industrial and economic growth faster than any hydroelectric dam.
After about eighty kilometres, the road further disintegrates into mud and cavernous potholes, and the land becomes suddenly bare and brown. Engineering on a massive scale is under way here at the site of the Nam Theun II hydroelectric dam, the Lao government’s pride and joy. I pass the powerhouse and then the road twists up and up through cooler damper air to Nakai village. Here I dismount, my backside numb from the ride and my feet and hands tingling from the vibrations.
I have arranged to meet American naturalist Bill Robichaud here, a man so crazily eccentric that ‘he looks for animals in the jungle, but not to eat them!’, as the Lao waitress explains to me in amazement. We meet in a surprisingly plush French restaurant, with prices to match – dam construction means foreigners, which means money. A couple of hundred metres from our table is the old river, already flooded into a large lake, drowning seventeen villages, the ancestral homes of 6,600 people, who have been relocated to nice-looking, newly built, traditional stilted houses above the village. The hydroelectric dam was only made possible with World Bank assurances to the dam’s international partners that it would underwrite the project should things become ‘problematic’ politically in Laos. And the bank also loaned Laos a third of the $1.5 billion funds. But the money came with caveats, including that people displaced by the waters be compensated (hence the natty housing) and that the forest be properly protected.
This is widely regarded as a successful dam project, both socially and environmentally. Even anti-dam campaigners concede that care has been taken with the design, siting and efforts to mitigate its impacts. Unfortunately, even with what appears to be the best will, things aren’t so simple. When asked where they would like to be relocated to, the villagers unsurprisingly said they wanted to stay near to their village, their friends and their river. The problem is that prime land in the village was not available – people were already living there – and so all that was left was infertile clay soils. The people were subsistence fishermen, but without the river they needed alternatives, so they were provided with crops. Everything died in the poor soils. Buffalo were given to them, which also died having nothing to graze on.
However, at the edge of the artificial lake, people are unravelling fishing nets to capture food to eat and sell – an enterprise that was not nearly as lucrative before the reservoir was created. Talking to them, most are cautiously positive about the project – they are already getting electricity for the first time, and the road is enabling communication with the outside world, as well as trading opportunities, and giving them options they never had previously. ‘I don’t miss my village,’ one old man tells me. ‘Now my life is much easier.’
The Nam Theun River didn’t drop with enough of a gradient before entering the Mekong for sufficient profits to be generated by the hydropower company. So, in an ingenious piece of engineering, the river has been dammed into a large basin, at the bottom of which a tunnel 250 metres long and nine metres wide has been bored down to the Xe Bang Fai River, which runs parallel to the Nam Theun but at lower altitude. This gives the water the rapid drop and strong flow needed for hydropower generation. While this will produce more than 1,000 megawatts of electricity, most of which is to be sold to Thailand for tens of millions of dollars a year, it also dramatically alters two rivers (affecting tens of thousands of people who depend on them) and impacts the Mekong, into which they both flow.
The dam is already having an effect on the ecosystem here. This forest is very special. Scientists rank it second only to Madagascar in terms of small-mammal diversity, and its 3,500 square kilometres have hardly been studied.5 It is an important refuge for nine species of primate, tigers, leopards and elephants as well as newly found species, including some thought previously to have been extinct and known only from the fossil records. Among its oddities is the saola, an antelope discovered in the 1990s, known as the ‘Asian unicorn’ despite its two horns, which is a new genus and possibly a new sub-family.6 It lives high in the Annamite mountains. And there is the kha-nyou, which is a totally new mammal family. It is a type of rodent, related to the porcupine, which looks a little like a big squirrel and lives among the limestone karsts.
It’s Bill’s job to oversee protection of this vast wilderness, and he’s been given an impressive $1 million per year for the next twenty-five years to do so. But the dam has created plenty of problems. The raised water means that parts of the Nakai forests are now accessible to hunters on boats. The site was also flooded before all the vegetation was cleared, meaning that plant matter is rotting within the lake, poisoning the waters, killing fish and producing methane.
We meet a day after Bill has returned from a two-week visit to some of the remote communities that live within the protected area, and he has some tragic stories. The forest is home to ancient hunter-gatherer communities as well as subsistence rice and vegetable farmers. But in recent years, the Lao government has been systematically seeking out and expelling hunter-gatherers and housing them in villages, where they are given some land to farm. Government officials find the presence of hunter-gatherers a national embarrassment that doesn’t fit well with its desired image of a modern developed nation. But once removed from the forest, most of these people become sick and die. Entire tribes have been lost in this way. They believe that their protective spirits stay on in the forest, too far to provide protection. It could be that they are exposed to new viruses or simply become depressed and unable to settle into agronomy. The remaining few want to be allowed to return, and Bill is negotiating on behalf of fifteen from one tribe.
I return to Thakek and follow the Mekong down the country until it shatters into a thousand rivulets, rapids and waterfalls at Si Phan Don (Four Thousand Islands). I stay in a sleepy village on Don Khone island, where there is no electricity save what the generator provides for a few random hours between 6 and 10 p.m. My fan hovers immobile above me through the sweaty night, its three blades paralysed above the mosquito net. Even the geckos, languid and fat on flying protein, seem to swelter in the heat, their calls dying mid-tone.
But all this will change, my excited host Mr Pan assures me. Soon will come electricity when the new dam is built. With soaring fuel costs, he can’t wait to abandon his generator. ‘And we will have Internet on the island with the dam’s electricity,’ he says.
Here, as everywhere else in Laos, the river is the heart of daily activity. I pass children playing in the waters, swimming and attempting to net small fry, a man bathes further down near to a woman who is washing up. Domestic ducks gabble further round the bend and I pass a floating vegetable garden. I take a twisty pathway down to Dolphin Beach, so-called because it hosts regular sightings of the rare Irrawaddy dolphin. At the beach I get chatting to local fishermen and end up joining them on one of the six daily sorties they make to gather their catches.
It’s early on in the rainy season, which means that the trap of choice is a slatted bamboo contraption that catches small fish swept up by the rapids. It’s one of ten specialist fish-catching devices that I count on the beach, each used in different circumstances, seasons or times of day. I hop aboard a fisherman’s boat and motor out the few yards to the trap, which the fishermen spend three months creating. We gather handfuls of fish for the grilling rack on shore, and for our lunch. It’s a semi-cooperative – a few fishermen who make and maintain the traps get to share the catch with their families. Few people catch enough to sell, but they have enough to eat well. I ask one of them what he thinks of the government’s plan to allow a Malaysian power company to build a dam spitting distance from our boat at Don Sahong, across the Hou Sahong channel, which is the most important fish-migration route in the region because it is the only one open throughout the dry season. ‘But we eat fish, not electricity,’ he smiles. But you would be compensated, I say. ‘The problem is, we need fish to eat, not money,’ he repeats.
The Mekong is second only to the Amazon in terms of fish diversity. And uniquely, more than 70% of its fish are migratory – some species migrating annually from the South China Sea in Vietnam as far as Tibet.7 These include the world’s largest freshwater fish, the incredible Mekong giant catfish, measuring more than three metres long and weighing as much as 300 kg – whose numbers have already declined by an estimated 90% in the last twenty years through overfishing. If the Don Sahong hydrodam gets built it will mean certain loss of a number of commercially important fish, but perhaps more importantly, it will risk the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people who depend on the fisheries for their daily food, such as the sardine-sized carp, known as the trey riel.
In the afternoon I visit Mr Vong who runs a restaurant on Don Det island. His business is closed while he carries out renovations. Over the past few years, he has experienced bizarre flooding patterns where overnight his restaurant and the path beside it get inundated for weeks or months at a time, and then the waters suddenly recede. Recently, he discovered the cause: hydrodams on the Mekong in China, more than 1,000 kilometres upstream, that release and stop water regularly. ‘There have been so many fewer fish here, too,’ he says. ‘If they build the Don Sahong Dam, I will have to close my business and move up into the Bolaven Plateau. Here, I will surely be flooded.
‘The Chinese dams are already causing problems, and the government officers came and said to us: “When the waters come, take your chickens and your buffalo and move to higher ground.” We cannot live like this.’
I ask him what the people will do if there are not enough fish in the river to eat, and he says he doesn’t know. ‘I need to eat fish. It’s the way it has always been. Maybe people will work in tourism,’ he suggests. A major tourist attraction in the area is the Khone Phaphene Falls, Asia’s biggest waterfall. But this stands to be another victim of the proposed dam, which will considerably reduce its flow.
Exploiting its rich natural resources will spur the impoverished nation into rapid development, the government claims. It will also push people from subsistence farming into more profitable enterprise – subsistence farmers pay no taxes . . . But ‘poverty’ is a very subjective concept. Laos has poor infrastructure (although it is improving thanks to Chinese funds), it has next to no medical provision, poor education and no social-service protection. But people do not starve here. Many are truly self-sufficient because they exist in a low population in a naturally resource-rich environment, even if the country is being rapidly deforested. People here gather fruit, vegetables, insects and other animals from the jungle and rivers – 90% live in rural villages – and they keep chickens and buffalo, plant rice and vegetables. In terms of cash, they are poorer by far than an Indian beggar; in terms of quality of life, they are perhaps rich.
For now. As the population grows (it has doubled since the 1970s) and the environment becomes degraded, polluted and lifeless, the Laos people will become as dependent as I am on food that must be traded for something else, on rice that must be shipped from another part of the country or world and exchanged for money that must be earned in an urban environment in manufacturing or the service industry. Lao people have something extraordinarily precious at the moment, and very rare indeed in this world: the ability to live a self-sufficient relaxed life in their home environment.
There is no glamour in poverty. And certainly many of the Lao I speak to are as eager as Patagonians for access to electricity and other important trappings of development. However, in the Anthropocene we have a choice over how development is attained and distributed among the poorest people.
In a country like Laos or Chile, which has few alternatives, exploiting rivers to generate energy makes a lot of sense, despite the social and environmental penalties. So, if we accept that many controversial dams are going to be built, how can their construction be made least damaging? Jamie Skinner, who was senior advisor to the World Commission on Dams and now heads the International Institute for Environment and Development’s water division, suggests the answer might be to issue dam-builders with limited-length licences. ‘In America, the licences are only for thirty or fifty years, after which there is a review. The reason many dams are being removed now, is that their licences have expired and the dams would no longer pass the more stringent environmental planning regulations,’ he says.
Removing the permanency of dams would make them more palatable to environmentalists, especially if licences were only granted with the proviso that the firm could afford to remove it in thirty years. The problem is that in many countries, poor governance and corruption mean that such agreements could be worthless. Even in the US, where companies are legally obliged to put aside funds for environmental clean-ups, it is often the state that ends up paying. Limited lifespans are sensible for another reason too – climate change is altering rainfall patterns around the world, leaving many dams economically worthless. The international Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, released in 2011, is a method to rank dams in all phases from development to operation, and should help managers design better dams to an internationally agreed environmental and social standard and reduce conflict.
Essentially, Skinner says, dam planning needs to be a participatory process. The scientists can analyse the different engineering options and their power and environmental outcomes, but it is down to society to decide what constitutes an acceptable impact. Putting in gated spillways makes for a more regular flow that is less damaging to ecosystems, for example, but reduces power output, so is less profitable.
If local people feel adequately compensated, not just for land and livelihoods, but with a culturally sensitive approach to relocation, and if they get a share of the dam’s benefits through electricity provision, for example, then dams can become far less traumatic and even be embraced by local communities. Equally, if we as an international community decide that some environments are simply too precious to dam, then we must offer compensation to those countries for their loss of potential power generation, and provide realistic alternatives for economic development.
Laos could use its powerful geographical position, and the fact that it’s home to some of the most sought-after minerals and hydropower potential to its advantage, to ensure that its wealthy neighbours pay adequately for environmentally sustainable exploitation of the Mekong. In that way, Laos could afford to leave some important sites unexploited to the benefit of all.
The Don Sahong Dam would be built just two kilometres north of the Cambodian border, and I take an early boat across to Laos’s sad, troubled neighbour. Cambodia is reeling from decades of brutality, famine, torture and genocide – struggling for an identity, trying to emerge from the past, but failing. It is a place where the ATMs dispense only American dollars, where the roadsigns are in French and where international charities perform basic government functions from health to education. In Siem Reap, a pleasant city thronging with tourists for the nearby Angkor Wat monument, women speak in clichés from American movies produced years before they were born. ‘Love you long time,’ they murmur at disinterested men. T-shirts with slogans like ‘No money, no honey’ hang from a market stall and are bought by young American women in tour groups, with pink cheeks and blonde hair and shiny painted lips, whose plump bodies spill richly from candy-coloured minidresses.
If the Mekong is the lifeblood of South East Asia, then the Tonle Sap, here in Cambodia, is its heart. It is the biggest lake in the region and its waters pulse through the seasons. For most of the year, the Tonle Sap is a round, shallow body of water covering less than thirty square kilometres. But as I journey along its length from Siem Reap to the capital, Phnom Penh, the new rains are beginning their swell. From June until November, the Mekong ushers in gallons upon gallons of flow, filling the Tonle Sap to more than fifty times its normal size: 16,000 square kilometres. The floodwaters refresh ponds and inundate forests, proving vital breeding and nesting grounds for the fish that migrate up the Mekong. Two-thirds of the fish in the Mekong begin their life in the Tonle Sap – it is the most productive inland fishery in the world, supporting up to 4 million people and providing three-quarters of the country’s fish catch. It means that even though Cambodians are among the world’s poorest people, they are some of the best fed.8
By November, the end of the rainy season, the brimming lake actually causes the river to flow backwards. This annual flow reversal is cause for great celebration in Cambodia and occurs in the stretch outside of the king’s palace, to much festivity. The upstream dams would halve this annual pulse (perhaps spelling the end of the famous reversal), and dramatically impact the ecosystems it supports.9 Around half of the river’s water would be held in storage over the border in Laos, and instead of an annual flood, the waters would be released at the whim of dam managers, who can override the natural cycle at the push of a button.
In the early morning, I slip down a rain-slicked muddy bank of the Mekong to board a rusty ferry downriver to Vietnam. There are few other passengers – most people are using the new highway. How different the river is now from the liquid crease folded into the mountains of northern Thailand. Here, the Mekong is fat and deep and hurtles along to the South China Sea like a migrating fish on its urgent journey south.
At the border the river splits into islands and channels – the Vietnamese call the Mekong the dragon with nine tails. People here live closer than ever to the Mekong, in stilted houses that reach the bank via wobbly boards tied together with ropes. Next to the floating café where I slurp my noodles is one such house, with a young family that is bathing in the river: mother, father and then two toddlers. Next the laundry is washed, sloshed in the river and slapped on their bamboo deck. Then it is the bowls and plates that must be rinsed. The river also supplies their food. A net suspended under the house holds a fish farm, and they feed the fish through a hole in the living-room floor.
Several new bridges are mid-construction on this stretch, but for now people cross from one side to the other on little canoes, rowed by women in pyjamas and conical straw hats against the sun. Further downstream I reach Can Tho, the capital of the Mekong Delta, where this once-glacial water spills into the South China Sea. The region is home to 17 million people, who depend largely on farming rice and fishing. Here, humanity has already changed the river: fish numbers are declining because of overfishing, pollution and sediment build-up (as a result of river extractions that reduce the Mekong’s ability to flush sediments into the sea). And the river is also turning salty as the sea level rises (owing to global warming), producing a measurable salinity of four parts per thousand as far as fifty-six kilometres inland.10 Many farmers are having to switch from rice farming to shrimp farming, which involves higher upfront costs and aquaculture skills that they do not have. The government is responding by filling in the smaller channels and moving ancient fishing communities into factory work.
I rise early to boat to the famous floating markets. I was last in this region in 1995, and I remember the markets as an enormous medley of hundreds of boats, spilling over with vibrant produce. This time they are smaller with few boats. Buying and selling is still under way, but in this region the bridges are now built, and floating markets will soon disappear completely, replaced by large land-based ones for the new motorbike-owning community.
The direct relationship people have with their rivers is disappearing as these water sources are diverted and dry up. But our dependence on them is as vital as ever – access to water is already a leading cause of conflict around the world and, although potential water wars have been avoided through river-sharing agreements and treaties, 60% of the world’s 276 international river basins lack any type of cooperative management. However, in many places conflict is being averted by water-rich countries trading with their less-endowed neighbours, and this will become increasingly important into the Anthropocene. Nearly the entire Paraguayan economy depends on selling hydroelectricity to Brazil. The two neighbours share the Paraná River, which is dammed at Itaipu. Other thirsty countries are considering buying water from their neighbours. The US, for example, plans to buy water from Mexico (piped from two planned desalination plants at Playas de Rosarito) and Canada. Analysts predict that by 2020 the world water market will be worth $1 trillion, mainly through a growth in demand in Asia and South America.11
Humans are also distributing water around the world through ‘virtual water’ trade – the trade in goods and services that are produced using water. Most of this – 92% of fresh-water consumption – is embodied in agriculture.12 So, for example, more than three-quarters of the water used by Japanese people originates outside the country in, say, beef bought from Australia. The water footprint of an average US citizen – which at 2,840 cubic metres per year is more than double that of the Japanese – is 80% home-grown, with the bulk of the remaining 20% coming from China’s Yangtze River basin. As nations become more water-stressed, however, a new strategy is developing. Governments are buying up foreign land that is rich in water, or angling for a controlling stake in how that water is used. All of these acquisitions are occurring in developing nations and most in places where there is poor governance, corruption, little regulation and where local people have few rights to their own land and resources. Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have all bought up huge tracts of land across Africa, usually in the poorest countries’ most fertile zones and river basins, to grow crops for export back home. The Nile River, for example, is now under pressure not just to feed its resident human population, but also those in other continents who have purchased parts of Sudan.
