For the Greater Common Good?
On dams and the drowning of the commons
I’ve been reading lots about dams the last two weeks, those marvels of human construction that also happen to be marvels of social technology, creating centralized control over one of the most basic and critical elements on the planet.
The curiosity about dams comes from many sources, including their role in displacement. There’s a clear connection to Land Back here, though with additional complications: what does it mean to return land that is now underwater? I’ve also been trying to learn about the way water rights and land rights interact, a big messy topic into which I’ve been looking for an entry point. Dams feel like both a nexus and an entry point on this matter.
What I didn’t quite expect, though it was right there to be seen, is that dams are also a way into thinking about the commons.
Many folks learn about the commons either via Garrett Hardin’s misleading essay on their ostensible tragedy, or through reading about the history of the British enclosures of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which those with power arbitrarily declared more power and closed off access to land that had previously been communally held, used, and tended. Forests where communal grazing and gathering once took place were no longer open. Newly unable to support themselves, rural Englanders found themselves relocating to cities and tied to wage labor and, ultimately, becoming the masses of workers both enabling and exploited by industrialization of later centuries.
This focus on the British enclosures has always seemed strangely Anglocentric,1 both because enclosures at that time occurred across Europe and because commons have always been global. The commons are, in many ways, the rather normal state of affairs for human interactions with their non-human community. That is, until someone with a puffed-up sense of self decides to bully them out of existence through some mixture of fencing and force.
As it turns out, one can also trace a history of enclosure-by-dams, a practice that is, unfortunately, as global as the commons themselves. This process is vividly apparent in the film Drowned Out, which documents one of the more recent episodes in the history of displacement and destruction as the result of major dam building. The film follows Adivasi2 villagers during the early 2000s as they protest their forced removal from their home on the Narmada River in India, the result of the construction of the Sardar Sarovar dam, which creates a reservoir that ultimately submerges their ancestral homelands.
Focusing in on one village, Jahsindi, the film tracks the means by which the Indian State dispossesses its citizens, turning them from collectively sufficient communities into separated, landless wage laborers. It predominantly follows Lahuria, a healer in Jahsindi, where his family has lived for generations. We watch him walk through the landscape, showing which plants can be used for headache, which for an upset stomach; we see also how members of his family, who are farmers, are knowledgeable in using the monsoon cycles and fertile river bank soil for growing crops. There is no record of ownership of the land where they live, no purchase that has ever been made, though different families tend different plots. But the farmland and forest both are simply the village’s, and they care for it together, and they are cared for, in return, by the many beings around them.
No recognition of this reciprocal and long-standing relationship between villagers and land is offered by the Indian government, no thought that perhaps they do not have the right to drown both the village and the plants. The state bureaucrats who champion the dam hide behind language about the ‘national interest’ while making plans to split apart the families of the village, sending them to different resettlement projects. Plots of land away from the river are sometimes offered in compensation, or sometimes only insufficient cash funds are given; many villagers are not offered anything. Instead of a river, the water available at the resettlement area comes from a handpump, and is barely fit to drink (“It’s very salty,” Lahuria says, grimacing as he tastes it; “It’s undrinkable,” a resident responds.)
On a visit to see if it is worthwhile to accept the government’s offer, we see Lahuria listen to those resettled from another project discuss the bind they are in:
“Everything depends on money here… If you don’t use fertiliser on land that has always had it, nothing will grow. The crop depends entirely on the amount of fertilisers we buy. Back home we didn’t have to buy such things. And we have to buy food for the cattle. They used to just graze in the forest. After so many expenses, not even a quarter of our income is left for us to live on.”
And there it is—once able to subsist, receiving food, medicine, and the means for shelter from the forest and river, they now find themselves forced to work, or to grow commodity items, to have the ability to feed themselves at all. They have been pushed out of collective ownership—the commons—and dependable subsistence. They find themselves instead in the marketplace of private ownership, where one’s labor may not be adequate to provide the means for subsistence itself. The film crew interviews a woman resettled from another village, who notes that they’ve gone from two meals a day to one.
Meanwhile, the bureaucrat responsible for the project, in his tie and vest and jacket, insists: “We have given them the best and put them in the bracket which belongs to the best people; and we should do that because they are our people, they are part of the Democratic setup, we can’t wish them away.” That last addition shatters all his bluster: who was wishing anyone away?
And yet the state is unwilling to let that wish fulfill itself, and deploys police to remove villagers who attempt to stay upon their land as the reservoir fills and submerges their homes. The villagers insist that resettlement is as good as death, so they may as well drown. But they are dragged out of the water and beaten by the police, who also burn the adjacent forest, even that which would not have been covered by the river. This is a curious incident, demonstrative of the state’s awareness of the landscape as a commons, which they otherwise refuse to verbally acknowledge or legitimate.
Publicity for the resistance to the Sardar Sarovar dam project received a major boost when author Arundhati Roy chose to become involved, only a few years after winning the Man Booker prize for her novel The God of Small Things. She famously wrote about the dam in her essay “The Greater Common Good,”3 exploring the ins and outs of government ineptitude and deception on the matter (which were enough to lead the World Bank—after activists pressed the matter—to withdraw support, a rather rare act). I read “The Greater Common Good” only a few days after finishing Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner’s well known work on water issues in the western U.S., which captures over a century’s history of corruption, destructive pride, shortsightedness, and all other manner of dishonorable qualities in both the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers (along with many other public agencies; let’s not forget Congress, or the leaders of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power4). The pairing created a strange sense of déjà vu; Roy was telling the same story as I had just read in Reisner, only in a condensed fashion, and set in a different time and place:
Construction of dams cast as necessary for nation-building, regardless of other consequences? Check.
Drought-prone communities used as a justification, even though the water will never reach them? Check. (Roy correctly predicted that water from the Narmada would not reach the state of Kutch, where many small farmers are suffering through drought.)
Big agricultural projects illegally receiving discounted water from dams, and then using their strength to push for even more dams? Check. (Bureau of Reclamation projects were initially intended only to benefit small homesteads, but instead subsidized the creation of Big Ag, especially in California—these illegal subsidies were constantly ignored.)
Engineers becoming enthralled with the idea of building for the sake of building, obsessively talking up the size of their projects, and with little consideration of their actual purpose? Check. (To really get a sense of this, I recommend the scenes in Drowned Out featuring one of the engineers enthusiastically gushing about the amount of concrete they’ll be using at Sardar Sarovar. So much concrete it could wrap around the equator!)
Construction companies and consultants getting wealthy off all this dam building? Check.
All plans for the displaced or impacted communities to receive benefits from the dams remaining entirely theoretical? Check.
Untested, dubious technological fixes offered in planning documents as solutions to drainage problems created by dams? Check. (Reisner discusses the inclusion of such proposals in dams slated to irrigate the San Joaquin Valley; Roy describes hypothetical solutions to Narmada drainage issues as a “giant science fair experiment.”)
Complete miscalculations about the volume of water actually in the river, both before and after a given dam goes in? Check.
Politicians using dam construction to build political capital, despite the dam’s failure to deliver on its promised goods? Check.
Failure to plan for the all-too-soon obsolescence of these dams? Check. (The end of Cadillac Desert highlights the growing issues of both accumulating silt behind the dams, and soil salinization from the accompanying irrigation projects. As Roy writes, “Monuments are supposed to be timeless, but dams have an all-too-finite lifetime. They last only as long as it takes Nature to fill them with silt.”)
Entire populations, entire towns, displaced without their consent, and often flooded unintentionally? Check.
Destruction of commons-based livelihoods? Check.
There’s a detail pertaining to this last item that particularly struck me: the Narmada River, it turns out, is also home to an anadromous fish, the hilsa or ilish, one whose survival has already been threatened by other dams in India. As Roy explains:
The Narmada estuary in Bharuch is one of the last known breeding places of the Hilsa, probably the hottest contender for India's favourite fish. The Stanley Dam wiped out Hilsa from the Cauvery River in South India, and Pakistan's Ghulam Mohammed Dam destroyed its spawning area on the Indus. Hilsa, like the salmon, is an anadromous fish - born in freshwater, migrating to the ocean as a smolt and returning to the river to spawn. The drastic reduction in water flow, the change in the chemistry of the water because of all the sediment trapped behind the dam, will radically alter the ecology of the estuary and modify the delicate balance of fresh water and sea water which is bound to affect the spawning. At present, the Narmada estuary produces 13,000 tonnes of Hilsa and freshwater prawn (which also breed in brackish water). Ten thousand fisher families depend on it for a living.
With entire salmon runs extinct or nearly so in the Pacific Northwest, and all of the evidence available linking the problem to the presence of dams, it’s astonishing to know that entire other species will suffer in the same manner, for the same reasons.
The fish, though, also bring us back to “the commons”—which ought not be thought of as static places (though the British forest examples tend to lead one in that direction). A fish run is unowned and mobile, yet nourishes and sustains whole groups of people and other animals as they travel, and thus is a kind of commons. The destruction of subsistence fishing, whether in the Northwest or India, while not the removal of land held in collective ownership, is an undoing of the commons. This is enclosure in extreme, cutting off movement not just of people, but of everything—the water and all that flows through it.
As the title of Roy’s essay suggests, “the common good” is often invoked to provide a kind of moral authority for the building of dams. Clean power, clean water, “for the people!” Yet what is done in their name is often done without their consent, and just as often, goes to benefit elite powerbrokers. This “greater common good” is the good of the abstract nation, who expects from its residents compliance and obedient performance of the sacrifice which the nation-state demands of them. Is such a good truly “common” in any way? Surely we see that the benefits and burdens of big national projects like dams are not “shared by all,” as the root of “common” would suggest. It’s a cynical use of the word, this “greater common good” that, strangely enough, is not held really in common. It’s yet another reminder of why, if we are interested in envisioning new collective relations to land, we might want to remain skeptical of schemes that heavily rely upon either infrastructure—be it social or physical—provided by any given nation-state.
Author Wallace Stegner once said, rather bluntly, Dams do literally kill rivers.5 We might say, similarly, that dams do literally kill commons. It seems easy to conclude, then, that if we want healthy, living rivers, and the potential for healthy, commons-based livelihoods, the dams have got to go. Yet only a few years back, the dam construction industry was going through a new period of growth, driven by demands for energy from sources other than fossil fuels. Still, removal is on the agenda in many places, which keeps me feeling hopeful on the matter.
In fact, Dam Removal Europe is even recruiting folks to help take down dams:
Now, I would probably have said that we’d need a lot of careful collective effort and some strategic campaigns to get additional dams dismantled. But maybe, some times, all you need is a good sledgehammer and a smile.
Let’s leave it there this time. More on rivers, and dams, and commons, all soon to come.
Until next time,
Meg
My guess is that this focus is somewhat accidental, the result of the popularization of some well written works on the topic, such as Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down.
The essay can be accessed online as a PDF or found in the collection The Cost of Living.
See Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space. (Though if you’re considering reading this, maybe check out my review of it before you rush out to acquire a copy.)