the water for fish.
The weight of so much water can also cause earthquakes, leading to dam breaches and catastrophic loss of life. In other instances, heavy rains can leave dam managers with the dilemma of whether to try to hold the waters back but risk bursting the expensive dam walls, or releasing the flow, risking flooding people downstream. In many cases, the flow has been released with devastating consequences for lives and livelihoods. In this way, dams that are intended to mitigate flooding can actually result in more serious sudden deluges.
Downstream of a dam, natural seasonal floods that revitalise wetlands and fertilise paddy fields cease. The flow may be so reduced that farmers cannot irrigate their fields and streams are no longer navigable. Migratory fish are often prevented from reaching their spawning areas, other fish have reduced vegetation and may be split from their breeding populations, affecting ecosystems and fisheries. And dams are a barrier to sediment flows. Instead of being flushed downriver, sediments get backed up against the dam walls, which damages the turbines and causes the reservoir level
to increase over time. Downstream, though, the effects of losing nutrient-rich sediments is far more problematic. The fertility of the entire system can be impacted, with soils lost during seasonal rains not being replaced. The upstream–downstream demands often straddle national borders leading to conflict over precious water.
However, the economic benefits can be huge, and the new reservoir can be a haven for wildlife, such as birds, or provide new fisheries and much-needed irrigation security. The Aswan Dam on Egypt’s Nile, for example, was highly controversial when it was built in the 1960s. Yet for all the environmental damage it wreaked on the downstream river system, you’d be hard pushed to find an Egyptian that advocates its removal – the dam has been an outstanding economic success, bringing improved harvests from better irrigation despite drought conditions, as well as hydropower and flood protection worth billions of dollars. Even there though, the river is contested. In 2013, Ethiopia voted to strip Egypt of its right to the majority of the Nile, the source of nearly all of Egypt’s water, paving the way for construction of a massive hydropower dam on the Sudanese border.
As with many development opportunities, hydrodams can be constructed in a way that is minimally socially and environmentally invasive, or in the cheapest way to make the fastest possible return on investment.
In August 2008, HidroAysén, the company behind five of the Patagonian dams, submitted its environmental-impact assessment to the Chilean environmental agency for regulatory approval. The thirty-two government departments charged with assessing the report found it so wanting that the company was instructed to address more than 3,000 comments and given a nine-month extension to do so. In October 2009, HidroAysén submitted its response in a 5,000-page addenda document that once again fell short of public-agency requirements, more than half of the departments making highly critical comments. These included criticisms that the environmental-impact assessment contained a lack of data on seismic risks in an area known for earthquakes and volcanoes, total unaccountability of glacial lake outburst floods, lack of data on impacts to key natural habitats in and outside of national parks, local communities, biosphere reserves of global importance, wetlands and aquifers.
However, with the two powerful companies behind the projects – HidroAysén and XSTRATA – enjoying the backing of Chile’s right-wing president, Sebastian Piñera, plans for the dams have rolled on undaunted. Over the past few years, the plans have been approved, appealed, thrown out, reappealed, reapproved, and so on.
I’m in Coyhaique to track down architect and keen mountaineer Peter Hartmann, who is the regional head of CODEFF (Chilean Friends of the Earth), one of the main groups opposing the dams. We meet in a busy café, where Peter picks me out immediately, unfurling his long thin body to lollop over, arms outstretched in greeting. In the booming flat tones of the partially deaf, he invites me to stay with him. ‘We’ll chat there,’ he says, waving away the waitress’s offer of menus.
We set off along a dirt track that worsens as it rises up the mountains above the town until I am thrown crazily from side to side as the truck negotiates increasingly deep ruts. But it’s worth the journey. Peter’s home turns out to be a beautifully crafted wooden house with a grass roof and windows that glow in the sun, reflecting the city below and an incredible rock colossus above. Over a shared maté – the South American herbal infusion sipped hot through a metal straw from a small gourd – Peter describes his many objections to the dam projects, from his concerns about ecosystem destruction to the visual disturbance of having intrusive power lines running through the unspoiled mountains and valleys he cherishes. ‘You are used to seeing electricity pylons and cables everywhere where you live, so you don’t realise how ugly they are and how they ruin a landscape,’ he says. ‘But here, we don’t have big artificial structures interrupting the natural view. It’s one of the last places on Earth like this and I want to keep it that way.’
Peter, who is helping lead the offensive against the dams, is a charming, generous and endlessly fascinating host. He provides me with an entertaining history of the area while he prepares a stew for our lunch from indigenous vegetables including tasty lilac-coloured potatoes, known locally as ‘meca de gato’ (‘cat shit’) for their undeniably similar shape. Peter is one of Chile’s very few vegetarians.
His passion for the area comes from decades of intimate knowledge. He has climbed its mountains and rock faces, navigated its freezing rapids and defended it against polluting industry and unsightly infrastructure. Large areas of valley and slopes around Coyhaique still bear the scars of the first European inhabitants. Arriving just decades ago, fleeing conflict in Argentina or seeking grazing lands from elsewhere in Chile, these cattle herders caused unimaginable destruction in their quest for arable soils beneath the jungles of Aysén. Lacking the resources or the will to clear the forests by axe, they simply set fire to it. Some 4 million hectares – half of Patagonia’s forests – were destroyed in the 1940s and 50s in the world’s biggest fires, which raged uncontrollably, fuelled by the dry timbers and the tinder-like flowers of the native bamboo plants. The devastation is still evident: graveyards of uncleared, un-decomposed trees lie where they fell. The thin soils, no longer secured with tree roots, and made weaker with the hooves of non-native sheep and cattle, simply pour off the mountains, silting up the rivers, reducing the limited arable land further. The once mighty port of Aysén, now silted to less than a metre deep in places, is no longer usable and a new port had to be built at Chacabuco. People in Coyhaique whisper confessions: ‘I personally burned several acres.’
Where cattle don’t graze, the forests have recovered. ‘We must learn from these mistakes we made in the past and not add to our destruction with megadam projects,’ Peter says. ‘Our proposal is to keep this unique, unspoilt region as a living reserve instead of destroying it like other parts of the world.’
Persuasive as his argument is, I want to understand what has spurred so many first-time protesters to take to the streets over these dams. We head off in Peter’s ageing Chevy, passing incredible vistas of high mountains and gushing streams. Deciduous trees in every shade of yellow and red cover the higher slopes, while evergreens occupy the lower. We hunt out rock paintings made by the few indigenous nomads that passed through this region and search in vain for the huemal, an endangered native deer and the Chilean national symbol.
We stop at a straw-bale house owned by Francisco Vio, a tourism entrepreneur. His home heating and electricity is powered entirely by solar panels with propane back-up for the winter months, when he gets just four hours of sun a day because he is in the shadow of a large mountain. Inside, the house is cosy and well insulated against the cold in a region where most people live in corrugated iron or timber shacks with barely a barrier against the freezing conditions. Wood for burning is cheap – a truckload, which lasts a month, is just $80, and although this represents a third of the minimum-wage salary, it is still cheaper than the initial outlay for insulation. Francisco is campaigning against the dam project alongside Peter. He first came to the region in 1986 as a hitchhiker from Santiago, fell in love with it and resolved to return and live here with his family. ‘What does development really mean?’ he asks me as he bounces his toddler on his knees. ‘Does it have to be a lifestyle where you consume more, create more trash, destroy the natural areas that give you a sense of well-being and make living