Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment (review)

In Deep Water, Jacques Leslie, a journalist, offers an account of his visits to dams on river systems in India, South Africa, and Australia. In each setting, he relates his discussions with an individual central to the dams: in India, the antidam activist Medha Patkar; in South Africa, the American anthropologist Thayer Scudder; and in Australia, the water-resources manager Donald Blackmore. Leslie became involved in the study of dams because of a heartfelt worry about growing water shortages, about the disproportionate impact of such water-melioration technologies as dams, irrigation systems, and hydroelectricity stations on the poor and very poor—including the loss of lands, lifestyle, and culture—and about their seemingly irreversible negative environmental impacts.

Medha Patkar has devoted her life to fighting dam projects on the Narmada River, notably the Sardar Sarovar Dam, because of its displacement of indigenous people and its environmental impacts. She has threatened to drown herself in the waters rising behind the dam as protest against the inequities of the project, especially its disproportionate effect on the tribal people who are one-tenth of India's population, but half of those displaced by dams. Leslie discusses the role of the World Bank and other international organizations in pushing for dams as solutions to poverty. Indian engineers and planners view dams and irrigation systems as the way to solve India's serious problem of water demand. But for Medha Patkar, the dams are a symbol of patriarchy and globalization, with devastating consequences for tribal people who are forced out of their homes to lands less fertile. Paradoxically though expectedly, the engineers for the Sardar Sarovar live in spacious, clean, air-conditioned quarters, and more funds may have been devoted to these facilities than for resettlement.

Similarly, on the Zambezi River in Zambia, the Okavango River in Botswana, and the Orange River in Lesotho, dams have pushed peoples further into poverty. Still, Thayer Scudder, who has served as a consultant on big dam projects for decades, remains convinced of their utility and believes it possible to work both with those supporting the projects and with NGOs that oppose them in order to arrive at a good dam with benefits to all. In this discussion, Leslie raises the issue that dams must be inherently political, but does not address it head-on. Yet his discussion of South African projects should leave no doubt that decisions to build them are both deeply political and technical. For what is a dam? It is newly built roads and an airstrip, quarries, a power station and power lines, demand located far from supply, bulldozers and police to remove the poor so that construction can proceed, resettlement carried out poorly with families and communities split up and moved to infertile land. And while a dam is all about water, paradoxically many resettlement communities have no piped water five years later.

In the last section of Deep Water, Leslie discusses the efforts of Donald Blackmore to use a bureaucracy to solve conflicts over water use among locals, farmers, fisheries, and power producers through integrated catch-basin management on the River Murray basin. Blackmore has had many successes, even though the basin has suffered through 150 years of deforestation, sheep grazing, increasing salinity of soils, and displacement of Aborigines.

Much of Leslie's information is anecdotal and in many places his book resembles "stream of reporting" rather than systematic analysis, because he refuses to draw conclusions from the rich stories he has gathered. Even so, Deep Water has nuggets of important information for those interested in the history of big water projects in the late twentieth century. The book has no index, bibliography, or footnotes, but there are a few maps to help place the reader.