Submerged: Indigenous Communities and Mega-Hydro Projects

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In the quest to find clean, renewable sources of energy, we turn to a familiar method: hydroelectricity. Today, the ancient method of harnessing the power of flowing water is hitting enormous new heights. Hydroelectric dams are some of the biggest human-made structures in the world. As humans dam more and more rivers, the scale and sheer size of these structures continues to grow.

But in trying to meet our future electrical demand, are we pursuing a technology that is harming communities, rivers and environments?

In our first-ever documentary “Submerged”, we hear the different ways Indigenous communities bear the brunt of mega hydroelectric projects. What happens when land is flooded, waterways diverted, and dangerous neurotoxins like methylmercury are released? Featuring Inuk Labrador Land Protector Amy Norman and Aimée Craft, co-editor of In Our Backyard: Keeyask and the Legacy of Hydroelectric Development, the documentary by Farha Akhtar gives us a first-hand and insightful account of the long-lasting legacies created by hydroelectric projects.

Daniel Macfarlane then shares his perspective on the outsized environmental effects of super-sized hydroelectric projects. The associate professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Western Michigan University sits down with Jay to discuss what actually happens when a free-flowing river is turned into a lake – from changes in species, to changes in local climates. They also discuss “hydraulic imperialism” and the colonial subjugation of Indigenous people and land.

The Canadian registered charity Raven Trust weighs in on its work supporting Indigenous communities pursuing the often-expensive and painful process of challenging large-scale dams and developments in court.

We round out the episode with the moving song “A Thousand Years” by Silver Wolf Band, a four piece Indigenous folk-rock band from Labrador, Canada.

This documentary and episode of What About Water? is supported by the Uproot Project, which is operationally and financially supported by Grist, its founding partner. Uproot supports journalists of colour who are underrepresented in the journalism industry, to help them tell stories like this one.

Guest Bios

Amy NormanAmy Norman (she/her)

Amy Norman is a proud Inuk woman born and raised in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. Her family is from North West River and Nain, Nunatsiavut, as well as Catalina, Newfoundland.

Amy is a passionate advocate for Indigenous Rights and for the Environment. She is an active member of the Labrador Land Protectors, and has brought their message of protecting The Big Land to panels and events all across North America.

Amy holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music with a Minor in Mathematics from Bishop’s University.

Aimée CraftAimée Craft (she/her)

Aimée Craft is an award-winning teacher and researcher, recognized internationally as a leader in the area of Indigenous laws, treaties and water. She holds a University Research Chair Nibi miinawaa aki inaakonigewin: Indigenous governance in relationship with land and water.

An Associate Professor at the Faculty of Common law, University of OJawa and an Indigenous (Anishinaabe-Métis) lawyer from Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, she is the former Director of Research at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the founding Director of Research at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. She practiced at the Public Interest Law Centre for over a decade and in 2016 she was voted one of the top 25 most influential lawyers in Canada. In 2021 she was awarded the prestigious Canadian Bar Association President’s Award.

Prof. Craft prioritizes Indigenous-lead and interdisciplinary research, including through visual arts and film, co-leads a series of major research grants on Decolonizing Water Governance and works with many Indigenous nations and communities on Indigenous relationships with and responsibilities to nibi (water). She plays an active role in international collaborations relating to transformative memory in colonial contexts and relating to the reclamation of Indigenous birthing practices as expressions of territorial sovereignty.

Breathing Life Into the Stone Fort Treaty, her award-winning book, focuses on understanding and interpreting treaties from an Anishinaabe inaakonigewin (legal) perspective. Treaty Words, her critically acclaimed children’s book, explains treaty philosophy and relationships.

She is past chair of the Aboriginal Law Section of the Canadian Bar Association and a current member of the Speaker’s Bureau of the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba.

Daniel MacfarlaneDaniel Macfarlane (he/him)

Dr. Daniel Macfarlane is an associate professor of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Western Michigan University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology, and historical geography. His research and teaching focus on American and Canadian water, borderlands, energy, hydraulic engineering, climate change, sustainability, and technology issues in the transborder Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin.

Dr. Macfarlane regularly teaches the ENVS introductory course as well as seminars on topics such as Great Lakes Water Policy, the Flint Water Crisis, and US Water Policy. He is the author or co-editor of four books about the remaking of Niagara Falls, the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, North American border waters, and the International Joint Commission. He is currently working on two book projects: one is a co-authored environmental history of Lake Ontario, and the other looks at the history of US-Canada environmental and energy relations.

Dr. Macfarlane is the author or co-editor of six books. He recently finished two book projects which are slated for 2023/24 release. The first is on the role of environment and energy in the history of Canadian-American relations. The second book is a transnational environmental history of Lake Ontario. Macfarlane utilizes digital humanities, such as GIS mapping and has co-authored several different print and online efforts showing how historians and other scholars can make use of digital techniques, including an online textbook (co-authored with Josh MacFadyen and Jim Clifford) The Geospatial Historian. He is an editor of The Otter, the NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment) group blog, and is a member of the NiCHE Executive. He is currently President of the International Water History Association (IWHA).

His writing and research has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Slate, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, The Conversation, Maclean’s, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Buffalo News, and The National Post.

Dive Deeper

  • There are more than 57,000 large dams worldwide. There are more than 300 major dams – giants which meet one of a number of criteria on height (at least 150 metres), dam volume and reservoir volume.
  • The Report of the World Commission on Dams, published in 2000, estimated that between 40 to 80 million people have been displaced globally by large dams
  • Dams have been linked to habitat degradation in the areas surrounding reservoirs and on newly created islands, harm to biodiversity and migrating aquatic species, and to negative changes – especially diminished connectivity – in river ecology.
  • Dams also exacerbate climate change by releasing methane from decomposing vegetation in flooded forests – a problem that is especially virulent in the tropics where many mega-dams were recently built, and continue being constructed
  • In 2019, a WWF study found that nearly two-thirds of the world’s long rivers are impeded.
  • Hydroelectric dams are still the biggest source of renewable energy around, generating 16 percent of the world’s electricity.

 

Photo Credit

  • Amy Norman – Submitted
  • Aimée Craft – KC Adams
  • Daniel Macfarlane – Submitted

Full Transcript

Aimée Craft (she/her):
I don’t think hydropower is the golden ticket. If I had a dam in my backyard, in my physical backyard, and the impact of it, you know, a run of the river dam might not be that significant. But when we think of these mega-projects, it’s really important to think about hydro in the context of First Nations territory and not thinking about hydro in terms of these remote, untouched landscapes that are open for extraction without consequence.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
I’m Jay Famiglietti on this episode of What About Water: a big dam problem, our quest to find new sources of cheap, clean energy led us to a technology that changes landscapes. One that forever alters the lives, cultures, and livelihoods of Indigenous people and their communities. The force of flowing water was something Mesopotamians discovered thousands of years ago.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Build a structure across a river stream and you can use the force of that water to irrigate crops. You can siphon off water for washing and drinking. Today, dams are some of the biggest human made superstructures on the planet.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Humans have erected roughly 57,000 large dams, including hundreds of giant ones, dams towering over 150 meters, like China’s Three Gorges Dam, a dam so huge that astronauts can see it clearly from space. It took two decades and tens of billions of dollars to build, and it uprooted more than a million people. By one estimate, up to 80 million people have now been displaced by dams.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
We keep building them and that number keeps climbing. As our producer, Farha Akhtar, reports, it’s the Indigenous people, communities, cultures and ways of life that find themselves living in the shadow of dams. Over time these are the people effectively being submerged.

Amy Norman (she/her):
This place is… it’s hard to put it into words. This is where my family is from… has been from since… I don’t even know. We have such a connection to these land and these waters and this way of life.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Amy Norman is a proud Inuk woman, born and raised in Happy Valley Goose Bay in Labrador on Canada’s East Coast.

Amy Norman (she/her):
And my family ties are to Northwest River and Maine in Nunatsiavut, on my dad’s side, and, on my mom’s side, to the Bonavista Peninsula area in Newfoundland.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Inuk families like Amy’s have lived along Labrador’s mighty Churchill River for generations.

Amy Norman (she/her):
My great grandfather, you know, had a little tilt, had his little cabin on this top line. I know where it is because I’ve been there and now it’s underwater.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
It’s been underwater for decades, ever since a mega-hydroelectric project was built between two provincially owned utility companies, Hydro-Quebec and the Churchill Falls Labrador Corporation. It flooded roughly 6500 square kilometers of ancestral Innu territory. There was nothing quite like it in North America at the time and it’s still one of the largest hydro stations in the world. And it wasn’t the last.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Construction crews returned in 2013 to start building the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam. A third one is on the books called Gull Island… all on the same river.

Amy Norman (she/her):
So much history and so many., you know, centuries and centuries and millennia of just yeah, just underwater… gone… destroyed. And for what?

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Hydroelectric projects like these come with big promises: a guarantee you will have enough electricity into the future. In fact, the International Hydropower Association, which describes itself as the global voice of sustainable hydropower, says modern hydropower projects are helping our planet make a clean energy transition. And hit our net zero targets. It all seems so hopeful. We won’t have to burn coal and we’ll have clean, green, renewable energy.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
But let’s be clear. We’re not talking small run of the river projects here. These are massive.

Amy Norman (she/her):
How do I describe the scale of these things? If you had, I don’t know, like five city blocks that were just entirely made of cement, like vertically up several dozens of stories. It’s just, like, enormous.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
The Churchill Falls Generating Station is one of the largest underground hydroelectric power stations in the world. On average, it generates enough energy each year to power 10,000 North American homes non-stop… for 365 years.

Amy Norman (she/her):
Churchill Falls has this kind of complex, complicated, weird history with the Province of Quebec. Essentially, they own the vast majority of the power coming out of that dam, even though it’s in Labrador, in our province.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
That’s because of an agreement signed back in 1969, when Churchill Falls was first built. The deal gives Hydro-Quebec the right to keep most of the profits. And when you’re generating about 34 billion kilowatts of energy, every year, that’s a lot of money.

Amy Norman (she/her):
So we get, you know, a bit of power. And we got this really one sided agreement where it’s bypassing all these communities on the coast of Labrador who are still run entirely on diesel and they’re not getting any power out of it. So it’s extremely frustrating that we take all of the risks and we see none of the benefits.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
These risks disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. Research from Harvard, T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows the vast majority of existing and future hydroelectric projects in Canada sit close to Indigenous communities. That’s not even taking into account the people living downstream who are affected. And then there’s this: the research found 90% of potentially new Canadian hydroelectric projects are likely to increase concentrations of a dangerous neurotoxin called methylmercury in nearby food chains.

Amy Norman (she/her):
It bioaccumulates in fat, meaning it builds up and it builds up and it builds up in fat stores. The small, itty bitty planktons it gets in there. Fish eat the plankton. Bigger fish eat those fish. Seals eat those fish. We as Inuit eat the seals. We’re so high up the food chain at this point — and seals are so fatty — that bioaccumulation magnifies what was, you know, a relatively low level of mercury.

Amy Norman (she/her):
It magnifies into really, really dangerous levels.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
And higher levels of methylmercury are associated with serious health problems like increased risks of cardiovascular disease and neurodevelopmental delays among children.

Amy Norman (she/her):
I’ve seen, you know, cousins of mine have to go to the hospital because of mercury poisoning just from eating, you know, our traditional foods off the land.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
For communities where food is already hard to get and expensive, being cut off from traditional food sources can be devastating.

Amy Norman (she/her):
So it’s harmful, you know, physically and structurally to our body. It’s harmful emotionally and spiritually to who we are and culturally, because it’s cutting us off from our ways of life and and living as our ancestors did.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
The sound of the rapids is kind of a cultural grounding. The sound of the rapids is not only part of the human cultural construct, it’s part of the identity and migration and the audio landscape of different animal species. That is the sound that defines every moment waking and sleeping of someone’s life.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Massive hydro projects, the turbines, the dams… they all turn landscapes in ways we can’t even imagine.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
When animals travel through territory, they rely on sound. And so to change the sound can significantly impact all of these animal populations in ways that really science hasn’t fully documented.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Western science may not have documented those impacts, but as Aimée Craft points out, Indigenous science has.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
The Knowledge Keepers and land users were saying this is going to impact migration patterns and even carving areas within that territory.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
But does this type of thing make it into environmental assessments? Environmental assessments are crucial when it comes to developing a project, whether it goes ahead and what changes need to be made. And yet, even though the evidence shows hydropower projects impact Indigenous peoples and their land, how much of their input actually informs that decision making?

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
That’s something Professor Craft explores. She’s an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, an internationally recognized expert in Indigenous laws, treaties and water.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
I’m also a university research chair in Nibi miinawaa aki inaakonigewin, which means Indigenous governance in relationship with land and water and its relationship “with” not “over”, “on”, “for”. It’s really about developing relationships of governance WITH and taking into account water and land.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Professor Craft got together with her colleague Jill Blakely at the University of Saskatchewan. Together, they wanted to look at Manitoba Hydro’s Keeyask Dam and the network of 15 dams and transmission lines connecting to it. They gathered testimonials and combed through documents from public hearings held a decade ago by the Manitoba Clean Environment Commission. Then, they wrote a book called “In Our Backyard: Keeyask and the Legacy of Hydroelectric Development”.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Their goal? Amplify the voices of Indigenous stakeholders.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
Manitoba has always had hydroelectric development and very low rates for its own citizens.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
That’s power rates.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
But this is really about commercial interest and export, and it’s not without cost.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Hydro-projects can create a lot of division in communities. Even in families. Professor Craft says sometimes Indigenous communities support hydro-projects because there’s a feeling these projects are going to happen anyway, so why not benefit from them? But this can be really risky. She points out the case of Keeyask, a project that’s now billions over budget.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
The cost overrun of Keeyask has impacted the forecasting of potential profits and benefits. The benefit is a little bit further down the road.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
And when the water levels drop, like they did with last year’s drought, that also affects any profits and returns Indigenous communities might get. But what about jobs?

Aimée Craft (she/her):
One of the things that was part of the Keeyask negotiations was having jobs for local community members from the four First Nations.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Just not high paying jobs.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
A lot of the employment in community is the lower paid unskilled labor. It is employment, but it’s not necessarily the training up that many had aspired to.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
And then there’s what happens when tens of thousands of workers from all over the country, mostly men, descend on a remote community.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
It’s been noted that in the construction of previous dams and it’s been noted also in relation to man camps for other industries, that large construction camps can have devastating social impacts.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Here’s an example. Fox Lake Cree Nation in Northern Manitoba. There are detailed allegations going back to the 1960s of band members facing discrimination, racism and physical and sexual abuse at the hands of hydro workers. Hydro workers who came to work on nearby projects. Yet Manitoba Hydro only started keeping track of allegations and incidents like these a few years ago.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Around 2012. To Professor Craft, this all speaks to a much deeper issue.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
In most Indigenous cultures, Land has a female personification. Many of us have heard the concept or the language of Mother Earth and that is really important in terms of how we develop that relationship with land and how we maintain it. One of the things that many of the Knowledge Keepers that I’ve worked with have reinforced is that what we’re doing to land as a woman, you know, this extractive industry exploitation and commodification, commercialization… that all of that is really a reflection of the permission that’s given through colonial constructs to take… to violate land.

Aimée Craft (she/her):
You know how that then carries over to the sexualisation of women and sexual violence.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Professor Craft is quick to point out that mega-hydro projects are not going away anytime soon in Manitoba and that hydro is almost part of Manitoba’s identity. But what about the identity of Indigenous communities, their lands and their livelihoods? In those early stages, when a project is first proposed, when environmental effects are studied and mitigation plans developed, shouldn’t Indigenous voices have a much greater say?

Aimée Craft (she/her):
Those perspectives have to significantly inform the development of policy, corporate and government perspectives on what should be done for development to pass the muster test and to kind of reframe these… these ways of thinking about how we assess what is good development.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
These mega-hydro projects may not be in our backyard, but they are in someone’s. Like Amy Norman’s.

Amy Norman (she/her):
From an Indigenous rights perspective, these mega-dams create almost like sacrifice zones, so people are willing to sacrifice Indigenous peoples’ whole entire cultures for the benefit of, you know, say, the rest of the continent.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
Consumers might not even think about any of this when we flick on our light switches or when we charge our phones. But maybe we should start thinking about it.

Amy Norman (she/her):
Why should listeners in New York and Massachusetts… Why are their rights and their demand for electricity… Why does that overrule my rights as an Indigenous woman up here? Why does electricity in the south valued more importantly than, you know, an entire culture?

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
I’m Farha. This documentary and this episode of “What About Water?” is supported by the Uproot Project. The Uproot Project is operationally and financially supported by Grist, its founding partner, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Uproot supports journalists of colour who’ve been underrepresented in the journalism industry so they can tell stories like this one.

Farha Akhtar (she/her):
If you’d like to learn more, check out UprootProject.org.
Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Those are the voices of Aimée Craft and Amy Norman, along with producer Farha Akhtar. Indigenous communities often carry the biggest burden of hydro projects like dams. That’s a pattern our next guest has watched time and time again. Daniel Macfarlane calls it “hydraulic imperialism”. He’s an Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability Studies at Western Michigan University. He’s written and edited numerous articles and books about dams in Canada from Niagara Falls to the Churchill River.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Daniel, welcome to “What About Water?”

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Thanks for having me.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So we often celebrate when a mega-dam is built like: “hey, look at this amazing engineering prowess and technology. We can we can tame a wild river.” But as we’ve heard, dams have a really dark side for Indigenous people who live where these developments are, don’t they?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Yes. Dams are often built at sites — you know — flowing water rapids that are conducive to good dam sites were also conducive to important Indigenous settlement. So that’s part of the reason is they just happen to overlap.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So “hydraulic imperialism”, what do you mean by that?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. Well, other people have used the term as well, but in different contexts. So some of them are referring to, you know, colonial powers as in England going to India or Africa. So that type of imperialism. I’m using it more in the sense within a nation. So the Canadian government, the American government applying that type of imperialism to people within its own borders, in this case Indigenous people.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
So it’s referring to the colonial treatment of Indigenous peoples for the sake of hydraulic infrastructure, often dams, but you could have irrigation and other purposes as well. It’s also about the imperialism of the state or the government trying to exert its power and its control and its legitimacy through the building of these megaprojects. It happens on several levels.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
On the one level, it’s actually taking their land that they live on or use for different lifeways and resources. So when you’re flooding out the upstream part of a river, then you’re going to actually be flooding their territory and taking it away from them. Then you’re going to be placing them on government controlled territory in most cases.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
So it’s allowing them to — the government — to then extend political control over how that community is resituated, where it’s going to be, what type of economic activity it’s going to have.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
I want to follow up on the dam building and the displacement, though. I’m kind of curious where these people, people go and who benefits from the power. So the people who live near the dams or have had to move because of the dams, do they actually benefit from it? Do they get any of this hydropower?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
In most cases, no. In fact, it’s quite striking. There’s some really glaring cases where, I mean, in the Niagara Falls case, where no, it just passes and goes too far, far away. Maybe even the white residents around don’t always even get it because it’s these high power transmission lines. And interesting, the US Canada comparison is the US hasn’t really built large dams since the 1960s.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right? So it’s because of that. It’s in some way is stopped its hydraulic imperialism, at least it’s new cases. Whereas Canada has continued building larger and larger dams. So Canada’s continuing this process with regard to the North, with the Peace River, you know, with the James Bay projects and things like that. It’s gotten better. You know, there’s there’s better processes in place for, you know, consulting with Indigenous communities and environmental impact statements and things like that.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So Daniel, I want to ask you about Site C in British Columbia. For our listeners who might not know, this is going to be the most expensive dam in Canadian history. And I understand there’s been a partial agreement in the case.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. So that’s an extremely large dam that’s been in process on the Peace River in northern British Columbia. So the First Nations community in that area had been going through the courts, heading to court. But as often happens in these cases, a settlement has been reached. So I guess this is an example of at least there is, you know, compensation and some consideration for what happens for the First Nations community.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
But they were asking for the dam not to be built. So, again, it’s still going to happen. There’s better treatment, but still certainly hydraulic imperialism going on and that the dams still are going to be built.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes compensation is a misnomer because there’s really no compensation for the environment.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. Well, you try to put cash value on non-monetary things.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Daniel one recent estimate says more than 500 new dams are either being built or they’re in the planning stages. Why do we have such a dependance on dams?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Well, I mean, in some ways it’s because electricity is the magic elixir of modernity, I would say. Right? Modernity is built on fossil fuels. But we can envision a future — well at least some of us are trying to — without fossil fuel. No one’s talking about a world without electricity. I don’t think anyone’s trying to conceive of that. So when you combine that need, that type of energy with with, of course, the good push for green energy, that explains, I think, a lot of the desire to build hydroelectric dams.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
But that also ignores many of the environmental and social impacts of what they can do.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
When we’re talking about big dams, we often refer to the size and the scale of something like the Hoover Dam at Lake Mead in the United States, which, you know, that was the sort of the gold standard, the biggest in the world for a while. But the Hoover Dam pales in comparison to what’s being built in other parts of the world, doesn’t it?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. Well, it’s extremely small now, actually, by large dam scales. It’s… it’s iconic because of its size and other political reasons, but also its architecture and curving lines explain some of why it’s so iconic. But I mean, what was being built a few decades later was already dwarfing it in the 1950s and 1960s within North America. But — you know — some of the world’s larger dams are being built in northern Canada.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
But, you know, the Churchill Falls and and James Bay projects. But even those are dwarfed again by what’s going on in Africa, Brazil, China. As our technology advances, it’s just whoever builds the next dam on a large river tends to be the ones building next biggest one. So the scale just keeps increasing.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So when we build these huge dams and even medium sized dams, by today’s standards, we know there’s huge changes to the rivers, the way the rivers flow to the environment, upstream, downstream. What do we know about those regional changes that are happening?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. Well, when you have a dam that blocks the entire course of a waterway, it’s not a run-of-a-river dam but a full dam blocking the water course, you’re going to have different scales of effects which are the immediate — from the construction phase — then the medium term from essentially changing a river into a lake — where you have the reservoir and forebay — changing the ecology of that water body. Changing the water speed, the temperature, the chemistry that’s going to have all types of knock on effects, of course, on plants, animals, what can grow in there, the pollution from building, from different water speeds.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
And a lot of those things I’ve described, you know, were known back when dams were built 50 or 100 years ago, but were just seen as, you know, the collateral damage that comes with building these sorts of things. But something that’s become much more apparent recently is large reservoirs, actually, because of all the flora and fauna that’s going to collect at the bottom.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
And so it disintegrates, it’s leaching methane, which of course is a very potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. So in addition to the CO2 from the concrete, massive amounts of concrete that go into these dams.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Yeah.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
I do want to ask you. Yeah, I do want to ask you about that. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
So there is uh — but that’s more recent. I think some of our knowledge of that, the methane part. But I mean, especially coastal dams on rivers going into oceans, so the blocking of anadromous fish. Right. So Indigenous cultures that are built around salmon or other types of spawning fish that come upstream. So that’s been a catastrophic impact on not only the ecology of that river, but for Indigenous communities that have all these different lifeways that would rely on that not just food but spiritual and cultural as well.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
So we have to — at least the US has been doing a better job of starting to remove dams rather than build new dams compared to Canada.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So I have a couple of other questions about the impacts to mercury and sediment.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Right. So again, what with blocking a river and its flow, again from the types of processes that happen when you change a river essentially into a, you know, a classic type of lake you’re going to allow for mercury accumulation. So we’ve had that happen quite a bit. So in say the St Lawrence example, which I’d written a book about, so you had the downstream Mohawk communities have been experiencing a lot of problems with mercury contamination.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
It also something that seems to go with dams is you’re often building large polluting industries by them. Because they want to contract in bulk for that power. So that happened with the St Lawrence case, happened with the Niagara cases where you had, you know, aluminum plants and different things. So it tends to turn those downstream sections into Superfund sites in the US — and mercury being one of the main culprits in that.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So, you know, I’m my research, I dabble in geodesy, which is the shape of the Earth. And I don’t know, you may know this, but I’m not sure if our listeners do. When you look at dams collectively and the amount of water that they store around the world, they actually change the rate of rotation of the Earth, which is called length of day, and they change the the axis of rotation that cause it to wobble a little bit.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
I don’t know if you ever throw in like when you’re a kid, like a waterlogged softball and, you know, the water is distributed in a certain way that’s unusual, right? And so you throw it and it just spins in a different way and it wobbles, wobbles in a different way. And it’s kind of what’s happening with the Earth.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
We could measure that super, super accurately. That’s kind of what actually was my lead in to working with some of the gravity satellite work that I do was hearing about that from some of my some of my colleagues. I want to go back to the concrete issue because, you know, dams, I don’t think people realize just how much concrete.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
It’s like millions and millions of cubic meters are required to build these big dams. And cement, which is a key ingredient in concrete accounts for about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. So when we look at those mega-dam projects, what kind of consequences do you see?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Generally we’re talking about mega-dams and especially hydroelectric dams. You’re talking about the need to have massive amounts of concrete. So the pouring of that, you know, very long process for a big dam is going to release gargantuan amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, which of course is problematic for climate emissions and for climate change. The storing of the water, when you are decomposing plant material and things like that, that’s going to slowly leach methane out.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Methane, of course, is much more potent as a greenhouse gas than as carbon dioxide. We’re just not putting as much of it yet into the atmosphere. So that’s why there’s, you know, more focus on carbon dioxide.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
It’s two super powerful greenhouse gases for sure. Then do we touch on evaporation? Like how regional evaporation is increased in some of these areas with dams? I know like for example, the Salt River project in Phoenix has jacked up the humidity, not a lot, but, you know, a little humidity in an incredibly warm climate makes it terribly uncomfortable.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Do you see this in other places?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
One of the examples from my research is 40,000 acres was flooded too, as part of the St Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. So locals argued that changed the local microclimate. So the actual weather patterns in that region and you can see how that would could make sense from, you know, evaporation and transpiration rates of what that could do to local weather systems.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Yeah, of course. Sometimes I worry and I wonder if you do too when we see these big estimates of how we’re damming up all these rivers. And for example, the World Wildlife Fund did a study that showed that about two thirds of the world’s rivers are impeded by by dams. So really affecting global streamflow. How much does that worry you?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Well, that worries me tremendously, because, you know, the rivers are the lifeblood of the geography, which they flow through. You know, we’re talking enormous impacts. And I can understand the urgency because of the climate emergency that we’re currently in. May we keep up the dams we’ve already built because at a certain point, you know, after 50 years, that reservoir has actually sort of adapted to being that what living in it has adapted to it.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
So in a way, it’s become partly natural, so it can have some negative effects and also just change it back to a free flowing river like it was before. Because of our need for clean electricity. Maybe we keep up the dams we have, but I don’t know about build anymore.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
So that leads me to my to my last question. I mean, is there a more democratic, holistic solution to still having hydropower? Is it more smaller dams? Or do you think we should just move away?

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Given the urgency from a climate change perspective, I could see making a case for more run-of-the-river smaller micro-hydro dams that are done in a sensitive way, ecologically and culturally. So ones that are going to block a river flow, create a reservoir so that full blocking, in creation of the reservoir is usually the main environmental or leads the main environmental and cultural impacts.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
But I mean, I this — they’re not going to be free of repercussions, but it’s sort of a calculus of whether those those repercussions will be small enough vis-à-vis the energy problems that we’re trying to solve.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
The only good upside of this is that there’s a lot of important work that needs to be done. And we want to thank you so much for joining us today, Daniel.

Daniel Macfarlane (he/him):
Thank you so much for having me.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
Daniel Macfarlane is an Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability Studies at Western Michigan University.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
For those Indigenous peoples who find themselves fighting hydro projects in their backyards, it can be a painful and pricey fight. That’s where Raven Trust comes in. It’s an organization that raises money Indigenous people can tap into to enforce their legal rights and title and protecting their traditional territories.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
We caught up with Ana Simeon earlier this summer. She’s the former Fundraising Campaigns Director at Raven Trust in Victoria, British Columbia.

Ana Simeon (she/her):
Raven is needed because the Canadian government, despite successive court actions, is making it very difficult for Indigenous peoples enforce their rights, whether it comes to an unwanted project on their lands or for them to have title to their traditional lands. Instead of negotiating, they force them to go to court. And these cases can cost so much. For example, for just a judicial review, for an unwanted project, it can run into $1,000,000.

Ana Simeon (she/her):
For a title case, it can be $10-15 million. And Indigenous communities often deal with multiple challenges. And so money to defend their rights has to come out of a budget that’s already strapped, that has to meet their housing needs, their health needs, clean water, all of those things. So the Nations choose the lawyer. They choose the type of legal action. And then they come to us.

Ana Simeon (she/her):
We fundraise. We mobilize individuals and groups and communities to fundraise amongst their own networks, helping that legal action move forward without it being too much of a burden on their community.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
That was Ana Simeon in Victoria, British Columbia. We’re going to end the show with a song by Silver Wolf Band, an Indigenous four piece music group from Happy Valley Goose Bay in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This is their song, “A Thousand Years”.

[SONG “A THOUSAND YEARS” PLAYS.]

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
If you’ve been listening to the episode and you have questions about something you hear on the show, send them to ideas@whataboutwater.org.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
We record and produce this podcast on Treaty Six territory, the homeland of the First Nations and Métis People. A special shout out to freelancer Darrell Din for helping us with today’s episode.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
“What About Water?” is a collaboration between The Walrus Lab and the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
This podcast is a production of Cascade Communications. Our audio engineer is Wayne Giesbrecht. Our producer is Erin Stephens. Our fact checker is Taisha Garby The crew at GIWS is Mark Ferguson, Shawn Ahmed, Fred Reibin, Andrea Rowe, and Jesse Witow.

Jay Famiglietti (he/him):
I’m Jay Famiglietti. Thanks for listening.