we live on earth and this earth is alive with trembling potential
Jerome Whitington
From the perspective of living river ecologies, a hydropower installation is an environmental disaster. Like all disasters, it unfolds along intersecting temporalities whose resonances and dissonances amplify across each other, and lull and crescendo in waves. Time is a function of the material relations at hand. Many lives are put on hold or nullified in the anticipation of a large dam, long before it is built. Military logging companies move through the reservoir-to-be; poachers rouse the fugitives and displaced from the bush. Land speculators line up along arterials and access routes. Conservation biologists and perhaps some activists poke around, asking questions. People living in the vicinity of the site come to inhabit a purgatorial time inside-outside the formal structure of the project. As ‘affected persons,’ their possessions are cataloged by well-meaning social scientists; their means of provisioning and affective ecologies are carefully misrecognized within the categories of environmental management. They wait, unable to plan for their lives or carry on about the business of living. Their dreams are replaced by apprehension, and promises that are difficult to evaluate. Uncertainty about how to live will become a basic condition of existence. Their aspirations are codified in enforced-consensual participatory planning for the disaster to come.
The first part of this essay traces the powers of a dammed river through the dreams of engineers, through the primacy of volume and the maximum asymmetry created by hydropower infrastructure. Adopting the perspective of a living river, it follows the course of the water through the erosion of the riparian environment and the erosion of the livelihoods of people who depend on the river. The second part of the essay takes up the experience of harm in the context of social abandonment by laying out one version of planetarity today. Hydropower as a planetary condition offers one way to examine our very powerful, very rapidly transforming earth, as when knowledge about how to live or how to exist fails in the face of a planet that has become increasingly unrecognizable.
I.
Rivers are powerful, energetic. One of their powers is to provoke a fantastical imagination, a dreamworld of their magnificence betwixt the gravitational pull of the earth and the massiveness of the planet’s charged, sun-driven hydrology. How does one fantasize the power of the river? In dreams, the river is harnessed. The river expresses the barely constrained powers of the horse, muscled instrument of war and paradigm of conquest. The curved face of the concrete dam, sixty-five meters high and nearly half a kilometer long, restrains more than two billion cubic meters of water, or two billion tons of potential energy. Although every dam is unique, this could be any dam for each is specific yet generalizable. This one bridges a tributary of the Mekong in central Laos, wedged between Thailand and Vietnam. The rippling skin of the reservoir calmly expresses tremendous lines of force that delicately balance each other. The dam presents a power that need not raise its voice, a presence consolidated by the mere fact of its existence. “The imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact.” (Haraway, 1997). A catastrophe is held in engineered abeyance.
The fantasy involves a maximum possible asymmetry, an ontological cut in the riparian ecology. The asymmetry is expressed in numbers, which characterize something like a technological sublime, forever impressed by its own feats of accomplishment. Four hundred sixty megawatts of electricity, 220 cubic meters per second of water flow, 18 percent rate of return. (Power is always an asymmetry.) The numbers roll around uneasily in the mouths of critical social scientists, like marbles, begging for some more familiar scale of the human. For the dam in question, the engineered structures suture together two adjacent rivers: the water is tunneled five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge, where it drops 230 meters in elevation to gain the maximum head pressure the topography will allow. Volume x Pressure = Power. The cut is ontological because it recognizes the river in one specific way that excludes or reconfigures other possibilities for the river’s existence. Although it takes time, all other variables, all other life relations rework themselves around this minimal relation forged between gravity and hydrology. The engineers are the first to conform to the exigencies of the calculations. (They have been doing it their whole lives, learning to stoop and bow to the numbers.)
Confronted with incredulity or whispered accusations of hubris, engineers roll back on their heels and laugh in their bright confidence. Christine Folch (2016) observes that these huge numbers “can be difficult to envision because of their sheer scale, but they are necessary for understanding how sovereignty and nature are tied up in the energy from the dam.” The question concerns the legal status of the state’s claim over nature, before it is distributed as property or rights to its use are leased under contract. The volume of water held by the dam represents a calculated compromise between the engineers’ dream of what is possible, the shape of the earth, and the statistical mass of rainfall in the catchment above. The engineers are confident because only they bring together the sovereignty of capital with the sovereignty of the nation state. The dam’s design is the engineer’s offering to the sovereign claim to the dominion of the earth, bequeathed to investors with the words “concession” and “royalties.”
[Figure]. The author plays atop maximum asymmetry at the Émosson dam in Switzerland, 2023. To place one’s body near the dam is to exist adjacent to the immensity of its power, and to the powers that built and own it. It is hard not to feel impressed, and cowed, even for people whose lives have been irrevocably cut by its presence. The international border between France and Switzerland was moved slightly to accommodate the jointly developed, binational project. To maintain parity between the countries, the Émosson dam is located wholly in Switzerland while the power generation facilities are wholly in France. I am grateful to Nant de Drance SA and to Mark Goodale and the energy transitions workshop at the University of Lausanne for the tour of this facility. Photo courtesy of Zeynep Oguz.
Four tunnels carry the water from the reservoir to a much smaller, adjacent river, about five kilometers beneath a mountain ridge. Enclosed by 28-centimeter-thick concrete walls and spanning seven meters in diameter, the tunnels are capable of withstanding a water hammer event, which is an unexpected shock wave capable of rupturing the engineering works. Imagine water filling a tube five kilometers long, seven meters across, moving at roughly a steady walking pace—imagine it slamming to a halt, surging. Something like 200,000 tons? (A back of the envelope calculation.) That is a water hammer event. The numbers index what Henrietta Moore (1994) has called a “passion for difference” in which volume is the priority of an ontological program that overrules every other aspiration.
volume-retention-flow, water-electricity-capital, from one current to the next
difference. above/below, potential/kinetic, Laos/Thailand, investment/return
Before/after. The construction of the dam is also a cut in time. The dam itself is an ecological event. To be sure, anticipation of the dam is a reminder that the event of the dam does not begin absolutely with the concrete structure, nor is the closure of its gates its culmination. All catastrophe is process, ongoing in slowness and fastness. All catastrophe provokes an opening, an unanswerable question of what has happened to us, which is not an experience that can be relegated to the past.
One fastness is the inevitability of erosion. The water released through the power turbines flows into a narrow channel, the Nam Hai, before it makes its way to the Hinboun river and then to the Mekong. The Nam Hai services a modest catchment. In its geological existence, the Nam Hai has never been asked to carry more water than this catchment could afford. Certainly, major floods occur whenever a tropical storm from the South China Sea breaks over the Annamite range. These floods had the historical effect of sculpting the riparian plains, depositing fresh layers of sediment, and flushing out deep pools, riffles and rapids.
With the ongoing operations of the dam, thousands of tons of sediment now travel downstream in waves along the riverbed. The rapids—essential breeding grounds—have become smothered in sand. Gravel has filled the deep pools that were once fishing waters covetously guarded by villagers against opportunistic outsiders. The channel has become much wider and shallower in a process that will take decades if not longer to stabilize. The banks are undercut by the current and the river eats the adjacent paddy. The difference between land and water has become unstable. Wet/dry is not an asymmetry, when the soil is in the water and the water flows across the land, a shimmering indifference across time. In slowness and fastness, the river reconfigures itself around the demands of its new infrastructural duties. In doing so, it also changes something of the nature of its existence. The river has become a drainage.
The erosion is a function of a specific, new resonance. The dam produces electricity tethered to economic demand across the Mekong in Thailand.
All the electricity from this powerhouse is not for Lao people. These 460 megawatts are reserved for northeast Thailand’s provincial capitalism, where demand ebbs and flows according to its own temporality. As the towns and villages awaken, the turbines rise to meet their day in a predictable pattern. Demand peaks in the afternoons and evenings, varying along with the strength of the economy and the weather. It is the duty of grid managers to ensure that enough capacity is available to meet this demand. Especially in the dry season, the dam provides peaking power that feeds into the grid only when needed. The ebb and flow of power demand is matched by the water’s outflow from the powerhouse. The water has become waste.
The Nam Hai feels it. As the turbines oscillate from peaking power, then idle as demand abates, the steady, twice-daily ebb and flow of water from the powerhouse mimics the patterns of life elsewhere. The difference in flow is 220 cubic meters per second. Two hundred and twenty cumecs for 460 megawatts. Not a bad trade-off, many people would say. “Like all large infrastructure projects, hydropower installations involve environmental and social trade-offs. Large areas of land are required and water sources are diverted, meaning that rapid changes are experienced in the project area and immediately downstream.” (Theun Hinboun Power Company, n.d.). It is this pattern of ebb and flow, wetting and drying of the riverbanks, that causes the erosion.
Rising each morning, and then again in the evening, the diurnal pulse matches a resonance that is social and economic, electrical and hydrological. Each day, the water rises to wet the lower reaches of the sandy river banks. When it retreats, the drying process helps the silt and sand crack and crumble into the swirling water below, undercutting the riverbank. Wetting and drying, wetting and drying, especially in the dry season, a new resonance is established. The erosion is a function of repetitive persistence more than the brute force of the current.
“The scheme’s whole justification depends on switching almost all the dry season flows to another (low elevation) river,” wrote a corporate consultant several decades ago. The company should “manage the two new river systems so that they develop productive and diverse new ecologies, with ecosystems similar to those of wild rivers with the same flow patterns.” (Resource Management and Research, 2000). That process is still ongoing, indefinitely, although it is totally unclear what sort of wild rivers the consultant had in mind.
Suspended solids in the water cut sharply into overall photosynthesis, limiting biological productivity. Meanwhile, waves of sediment flow along the bed of the river, making its geomorphology unpredictable. The shape of the riverbed changes constantly. Monsoon flooding once regulated wet rice agriculture, which was largely for subsistence and formed the basis for relative autonomy of the riparian villages. Because the flooding is unpredictable, thanks to the morphing shape of the riverbed, much of that paddy now cannot be farmed in the wet season. Erosion continues unabated for the foreseeable future, a geological process implicating geological time. The shift to dry season irrigated rice, supported by the hydropower company in the name of adaptation, requires:
debt
energy for pumping water
chemical dependencies (fertilizer at minimum)
subjection to the abstract forces of the market
—a complete ensemble of bondage. Forced resilience.
But that is only a possibility for a select few.
II.
Hydropower offers one way to think about the general form of planetarity today. According to an important article, written by lead author Jaia Syvitski with 17 co-authors (2020), “95.7% of the world’s total [dammed] reservoir capacity was emplaced after 1950 CE, increasingly in Asia.” Additionally, Syvitski and her colleagues calculate that people have used more energy since 1950 than in all prior human existence. Before coal, hydropower was the technology leading the world-wide expansion of distributed electricity generation. In the Mekong Basin, nearly all the dam sites proposed for development were identified in the 1950s through the preliminary planning operations of the Mekong Commission, supported by the United Nations and the US Bureau of Reclamation. Dam building was, of course, a central feature of US foreign policy construed as anti-communist diplomacy. In the words of Eugene Black (1969), third president to the World Bank, hydropower development was the key “alternative in Southeast Asia.” Development and war were parallel strategies of US imperialism. The empire needed hydropower just as much as postcolonial nationalism did.
And yet, given each dam’s uniqueness, all must be designed with special attention to the specificities of place, geology, and hydrology wherever they are built around the world. In this sense, dams are modular; their rapid expansion suggests a form of post-WWII technical rationality, and political-financial circumstances, in which the basic form was able to proliferate in a geological instant. Dams and their aftermath thus represent one paradigm of planetarity during this time of a rapidly changing, powerful earth. Something like 52,000 large dams have been built in the past 75 years on the vast majority of the world’s rivers. Most remaining free-flowing rivers empty into the Arctic. If smaller, yet still ecologically significant dams are included, the number balloons into the millions. The fact that different societies have built dams of some sort or another for centuries (and even millennia) shows how unlikely it is that within a few decades most of the world’s major rivers were dammed using a narrow range of technologies, promoted and designed by people from a narrow range of sociopolitical milieux. As such, every modern dam is planetary because each has participated in the near-instantaneous worldwide damming of the world’s rivers.
That paradigm continues, amplified: As a supposedly carbon-free energy technology, hydropower is a central strategy of climate mitigation efforts, which have only intensified existing regimes of the planetary. Even without this new expansion in investment, we know that many, many lives have been upended thanks to hydropower development. The International Displacement Monitoring Centre (2017) estimates that perhaps 80 million people have been displaced by large dams.
Some readers may be familiar with the idea of slow violence, which certainly applies to the environmental disaster of hydropower. Yet what constitutes violence? Does violence imply or require physical harm to the body? When Veena Das (2007) scrutinized violence and its recapitulation in everyday life across generations, she referred to the brutality of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in which more than one million people were killed, often at the hands of their neighbors. Reflecting on the ongoing and recent experience of Palestinians, it seems self-indulgent to describe the effects of this hydropower facility in terms of violence. As far as I know, no human person was killed, directly or indirectly, as a result of this dam. For nonhumans the situation is different. Furthermore, we know that violence and domination are distinct modalities of power, and that violence can stem from neglect, just as it can be the result of intensified physical interaction. One may endure the withdrawal of certain conditions of living, for example, which is applicable in this case.
Conceptually, we could focus on diverse experiences of harm, which would avoid collapsing important differences into a neatly labeled catch-all. More importantly, harm does not rely on the conceptual primacy of physical violence as the template for understanding other forms of harm (economic, emotional, structural). Being clear about diverse experiences of harm and their sociocultural implications respects their differences and maintains openness to the grievousness of all injustices without discounting any form of loss. Finally, as with some of the most compelling research on violence, harm as a category maintains concern for the agency of those who experience it. In fact, people who endure harm create complex ways to continue living, and the capacity to bear harm—to continue living—is powerful in its own right.
When lives become reoriented around the reality of the dam and its operations, they do so in vastly different ways. Yet the terms of that reorientation are not determinate, for the simple reason that the new reality does not come with instructions. People and other beings must figure out for themselves how they will come to terms with the loss not only of their living conditions but, more broadly, their overall mode of being when aspects of who they are cannot be maintained. Being human is a verb, Sylvia Wynter (2003) has taught us. In the process, people have to figure out who they will become given dramatically changed circumstances. Even if there is a plan, everyone affected must work out for themselves who they will be, how they will continue existing, and how they will find value in their lives. They must decipher a new reality, which may not be an easy task. They must recompose their own meaningful existence without the familiar reference points. And this may not be possible, since the dam makes certain ways of being human impossible. (Call it violence if you want.) As a disaster - an event, the dam does not provide options or meaningful advice for who to be or how to become otherwise—perhaps a few suggestions but nothing concrete. You’re on your own, kid. Figure it out yourself. You have nothing to sell but your labor and nothing to lose but your life.
Societies invest in protecting the people and property they care about; disasters reflect prefigured abandonment and social trade-offs. If there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster,’ this should not be construed as an invitation to total planning or new forms of social control. Such an approach can really only exist within the rationality of catastrophism, which promises mastery and control yet proceeds by way of abandonment, experimentation and failure. It shows how our language engages a double-headed, quixotic death-dance with ‘certainty,’ which drives some people toward the ineluctable conclusion that we need a system of total planetary control, or at least the intimacies of governed sustainability, a biopolitics of the environment. Even the word ‘environment’ implies an outside envelopment that occasionally cracks the fortified sphere of social predictability. (Nature as the stage for the theater of human dramas.) Yet more fortification does not mean more predictability, only higher stakes. The term uncertainty seems to indicate the absence of something, yet that thing, certainty, has never existed and is only the mathematicians’ dream. Uncertainty is not the absence of certainty but a positive condition of living in which the value of knowledge is at stake. It is neither a claim that we know nothing nor a demand that we know everything. Uncertainty is the name given to the recognition that we live on earth and this earth is alive with trembling potential. It acknowledges the fact that the ways that we know how to be human may simply cease to function due to forces wholly beyond our control. And mostly, we need to find ways for earth to flourish on its own terms, facilitated by different ways of being human.
Human, an adjective, or better an adverb
from Proto Indo-European *(dh)ghomon-, literally ‘earthling, earthly being’
as opposed to the gods (from root *dhghem- ‘earth’)
Compare Hebrew adam ‘man,’ from adamah ‘ground’ (Etymology, n.d.)
his happiness should smell of earth
not of contempt for the earth (Nietzsche, 1961)
Who are we capable of becoming? Are we capable of becoming earthlings? Who is the subject of the first-person plural in this register? To the extent that ‘environment’ remains a language of loss it will assume the form of the tragic. This is inherent to the expectation that environment is something outside of society to be considered only when things go wrong. Conversely, there are many ways of being that find plentitude and flourishing in earthliness and can reimagine life outside of the structures of maximum asymmetry. As with all things, unwinding from this dangerous planetary situation will take time and practice. Flourishing happens in stillness and fullness, in fastness and slowness. The earth is both very old and very new.
Literature
Black, E. (1969). Alternative in Southeast Asia. Praeger.
Das, V. (2007). Life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. University of California Press.
Folch, C. (2016). The nature of sovereignty in the Anthropocene: Hydroelectric lessons of struggle, otherness, and economics from Paraguay. Current Anthropology 57(5), 565–585. https://doi.org/10.1086/688580
Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and technoscience. Routledge.
Human. (n.d.). In Etymology online. Retrieved July 24, 2024, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/human
International Displacement Monitoring Centre. (2017). Dams and internal displacement. https://api.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/20170411-idmc-intro-dam-case-study.pdf
Moore, H. L. (1994). A passion for difference: Essays in anthropology and gender. Indiana University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1961). Thus spoke Zarathustra (R. J. Hollingsworth, Trans.). Penguin.
Resource Management and Research. (2000). Environmental management plan. Unpublished Document.
Syvitski, J., Waters, C. N., Day, J., Milliman, J. D., Summerhayes, C., Steffen, W., Zalasiewicz, J., Cearreta, A., Gałuszka, A., Hajdas, I., Head, M. J., Leinfelder, R., McNeill, J. R., Poirier, C., Rose, N. L., Shotyk, W., Wagreich, M., & Williams, M. (2020). Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE initiated the proposed Anthropocene Epoch. Communications Earth & Environment 1(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-020-00029-y
Theun Hinboun Power Company. (n.d.). Power generation. https://www.thpclaos.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34&Itemid=207&lang=en
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257–337.
Jerome Whitington is Clinical Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Energy, and Environment at New York University (NYU). His research is focused on mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Laos, with new research in central Appalachia. His first book is Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell, 2018), and he has published in journals such as parallax, American Anthropologist, Public Culture, and Environmental Humanities. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Experimental Earth: A Speculative Anthropology of Climate Change. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Senior Research Fellow and Teaching Fellow at the National University of Singapore.