The Ugly Truth about Dams is Revealed
Jim Harrison was one of my favorite writers. His novel “A Good Day to Die” is a trip—literally and figuratively. Three characters—a poet who obsesses about fly fishing in cold, fast-moving streams, a drug-addled, violent Vietnam veteran and a young woman who loves both men—embark on a road trip with a case of dynamite to save the Grand Canyon by blowing up a dam they believe is being built. The premise is a dark take on the path less traveled in contemporary America, and fitting for this review.
If you fly fish, you’re aware that dams are an enemy to what we hold sacred. Although they are touted as sources of renewable energy, hydropower dams flood large areas, force people to relocate, threaten freshwater biodiversity, disrupt subsistence fisheries and leave rivers dry—substantially affecting ecosystems.
Throughout history, humans have dammed rivers at the cost of wild fish, Indigenous peoples, forested land and healthy watersheds. Adding to the havoc of today’s climate-change-induced weather extremes and water shortages, science says there’s no future for the business of dam-building. A new book from Patagonia offers hope for the dam-removal movement and how it will contribute to the mitigation of the climate crisis: when we free rivers, watersheds are restored, and Earth heals itself.
In “Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World” (Patagonia, May 2023, 320 pages) author Steven Hawley, an Oregon-based environmental journalist and documentary filmmaker, delivers the full, ugly truth about dams—a reckoning of America’s misguided attempts to control water. He also offers a pathway toward freeing our rivers.
Over the past 20 years, the mess made by America’s dam-building binge of the 20th century has come to light. Hawley highlights that what started out as arguably good government projects—to turn rivers into revenue streams—has drifted oceans away from that original intent. As a result, water control projects’ main legacy is tainted by needless ecological destruction and a host of unnecessary cultural injustices.
“Steven Hawley has written, and Patagonia has brilliantly supported, an undamming book powerful beyond anything I thought possible in a time of cynicism, greed, and cave-troll politics,” writes David James Duncan, author of “The River Why” (Bantam, 1983) in the new book’s foreword. “With calm clarity, this book shows us how to judge the value of a dam and begin removing the dangerous and valueless ones. This book reminds us that it is rivers, and not reservoirs, that allow natural selection to select naturally the biodiversity to diversify.”
“Cracked” is a speed date with the history of water control—its dams, diversions and canals, and just as importantly, the politics and power that evolved with them. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in a world that is becoming increasingly dry under the ravages of climate chaos—are well beyond the benefits. Success stories from Patagonia and the Blue Heart of Europe point to a possible future where rivers run free.
There are currently over 90,000 dams 15 feet tall or higher in the United States, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In a report by the World Wildlife Fund, freshwater species in North America have declined by 83% since 1970. The estimated 800,000 dams in the world can’t be blamed for destroying the earth’s entire biological inheritance, but they play an outsized role in that destruction.
The chapter “Dam Removal 101” equips activists with tools, resources and success stories for cleaning up these man-made messes, ensuring that future generations don’t live with the mistakes of the past. Hawley walks readers through the process of campaign organizing, goal setting, financing, permitting, and the final step of site restoration and monitoring.
“Dam removal is not purely an engineering game, nor strictly an exercise in ecological improvement,” says Hawley. “It’s a grassroots organizing project, an endeavor in door-to-door diplomacy, a revival of the practice of community-level democracy to which politicians are always vaguely alluding, and which the vast majority can’t quite seem to remember how to perform.”
Published nearly 10 years after Patagonia’s groundbreaking documentary “DamNation,” “Cracked” underlines the company’s long-standing commitment to freeing rivers and saving wild fish. Hawley’s new book (hardcover retail price: $28) is available at leading booksellers and from the publisher at Patagonia.com.
About the Author
Steven Hawley is a writer and filmmaker from Hood River, Ore. He is the writer and co-producer of an award-winning documentary “Dammed to Extinction” (2019), and the author of ”Recovering a Lost River” (Beacon Press, 2011). He was among the first to write about the historic agreement to tear out Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine. Since then, his work has appeared in High Country News, OnEarth, The Oregonian, Missoula Independent and other publications. He’s also a contributor at The Drake, Outlaw and the Columbia Insight.
Review by Joe Shields
Photos Courtesy of Patagonia
