(Continued from yesterday) It is certainly not in the way in which journalist Jacques Leslie (2005) in his book Deep Water: The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced people, and the Environment, sees dams and the flood protection they provide, much preferring the free-flowing river:
"Hoover’s (Dam] image became one of the nation’s most popular exports: after it, every country wanted dams, and every major country, regardless of ideology, built them. Between Hoover and the end of the century, more than forty-five thousand dams—dams at least five stories [50 feet] tall—were built in 140 countries. By now the planet has expended $2 trillion on dams, the equivalent of the entire 2003 U.S. government budget. The world’s dams have shifted so much weight that geophysicists believe they have slightly altered the speed of the earth’s rotation, the tilt of its axis, and the shape of its gravitational field. They adorn 60 percent of the world’s two-hundred—plus major river basins, and the water behind them blots out a terrain bigger than California. Their turbines generate a fifth of the world’s electricity supply, and the water they store makes possible as much as a sixth of the earth’s food production. Take away Hoover Dam, and you take away a bearing, a confidence, a sense of what nations are for.
"Yet in a sense, that’s what’s happening. Even if Hoover lasts another eleven hundred years (by which time Bureau of Reclamation officials say Lake mead will be filled with sediment, turning the dam into an expensive waterfall), its teleological edifice has already begun to crumble. In seven decades we have learned that if you take away Hoover, you also take away millions of tons of salt that the Colorado once carried to the sea but that have instead been strewn across the irrigated landscape, slowly poisoning the soil. Take away the Colorado River dams, and you return the silt gathering behind them to a free-flowing river, allowing it again to enrich the downstream wetlands and the once fantastically abundant, now often caked, arid, and refuse-fouled delta. Take away the dams, and the Cocopa Indians, whose ancestors fished and farmed the delta for more than a millennium, might have a chance of avoiding cultural extinction. Take away the dams, and the Colorado would again bring its nutrients to the Gulf of California, helping that depleted fishery to recover the status it held a half century ago as an unparalleled repository of marine life. Take away the dams, finally, and the Colorado River returns to its virgin state: tempestuous, fickle, in some stretches astonishing." (p.5)
This is the thinking that places nature above human beings, this is the thinking that sees “human beings as a cancerous virus upon the earth”, that sees all things on earth as one and equal, this is the thinking that philosophy professor Dr. Alston Chase (2001) warns us about in his book In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests & the Myths of Nature:
"From America’s long-term infatuation with primitive wilderness the [environmental] movement derived the notions that preservation meant “restoring” these prehistoric “conditions” by leaving nature alone. From preservationists such as Thoreau and Muir it inherited a Calvinistic certainty ion the righteousness of its cause which justified moral exclusion of those deemed to be damned.
"Borrowing from European ideas, it transformed ecology from a promising science into a highly political one. From thinkers such as Hegel and Naess it derived a monistic metaphysics justifying activism and absolutism, and a belief that nature was the source of political truth. The vision of all things as interconnected led to the idea that all things were equally valuable. Positing ecosystem health as the supreme value diminished the standing of individuals.
"Out of this odd coupling of mystical American ideals with systematic European philosophies rose a doctrine that was neither fascist nor entirely home-grown but something new—biocentrism, which held that the best way to preserve nature was to leave it alone, and that the supreme good to which society should dedicate itself is not human happiness, but the health of nature. The ecosystem became the model for culture, and global survival was deemed to depend on promoting “diversity” by social engineering or by force. "(p. 412)
They forgot essential American principles Chase later noted: “Of humanity is the standard of value, then policies must be measured by the extent to which they enhance human life.” (ibid. p.417) and the natural preservation principles embodied by the work of Fredrick Law Olmstead and the English Garden ethic which influenced him also noted by Chase, “Rather than halting or reversing disturbances [in nature], we should embrace change. Rather that excluding man from the garden, we should welcome his cultivation of it. Rather than feeling compelled by metaphysical imperatives to save pseudoscientific “ecosystems,” we should seek to sustain a variety of landscapes simply because they please us.” (ibid. p. 418)
