Torpedo the dams, full speed ahead

We're Paying the Price Today for Decades of Relentless Dam Building

by: Rachel Olivieri, AlterNet

Decades ago, three new dams were started every day. But the debts of temporary prosperity are all coming due and payable today.

Between 1950 and 1970, three new dam projects were started every single day in the world. Today, primarily in China, Turkey, Brazil, Japan and India, one new dam project begins daily with an average completion date of four years. Fifteen hundred dams are currently under construction worldwide.

Dams fragment, divert and subjugate the world's rivers. In one long lifespan, beginning with the inauguration of Hoover Dam in 1936, the engineering marvel of the 20th century, civilization has altered the most important function that makes the earth work, water. Thus, transmuting humanity into something foreign to the earth it inhabits - a stranger to the very system which gave rise to our species.

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Aside from warming atmospheric conditions, and considering only current global population additions (80 million per year), the equivalent of adding a new Germany annually, and factoring rising water consumption rates which triple with each population doubling, all of human enterprises will consume and significantly pollute 90 percent of all the available freshwater by 2025 leaving a scant 10 percent to support the earths dwindling water-dominant ecosystem.

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