Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers by Huang Peter I-min;

Author:Huang, Peter I-min;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mega Dams in Taiwan

The scenes in Solar Storms that refer to the effort by industrialists to build a dam in Cree territory connect to ecofeminist and new materialist ecocriticism arguments that one cannot separate issues of ecocide from issues of genocide. The scenes also bring attention to the roles that mega dams play in the privatization of and the control of access to the planet’s dwindling supplies of potable water. A recent news article, “UN warns over water problems” (2012), summarizes the main points of the World Water Development Report, a document that the United Nations releases every three years: “[P]opulation growth and a shift to more-intensive meat diet will drive up demand for food by some 70 percent by 2050” and the consumption of water for agricultural purposes will increase by 20 percent within the next forty years. Already, the world’s aquifers are in danger of becoming dry. Within the last fifty years, industrial abstraction of these deep underground natural water reservoirs, which “supply nearly half of all drinking water today,” has tripled, and this abstraction shows no signs of abating.[7]

Patrick D. Murphy discusses the problem of water waste and water scarcity in a monograph entitled Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Argument, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique (2013). Expanding on an argument that he makes in “Damning Damming Modernity” (2011), one of the chapters of Transversal Ecocritical Praxis: Theoretical Argument, Literary Analysis, and Cultural Critique (2013), he argues that the industrialists who designed and pushed for the great dams that were constructed in the twentieth century never intended those reservoirs to serve mainly as a source of water for domestic and agricultural use; rather, they intended the dams to serve primarily as hydropower for big industry, and in building these dams, they wasted rather than conserved copious amounts of planetary water. Only 2.5 percent of the Earth’s water is “fresh, rather than salt, water” (Murphy 2013, 139). Most of this until very recently was locked up in glaciers and icecaps. Although humans have been trapping water for domestic and agricultural use by building dams for more than four thousand years, after the nineteenth century, their dam constructions “entered an entirely new phase” (140). Dam construction “dramatically accelerated” and no longer reflected older uses of dams (140). Governments started to harness water not only for agricultural and domestic use but also for the generation of hydroelectric power (140). In addition, the sizes of dams increased greatly after the nineteenth century. These have put industrialized and industrializing countries on profoundly environmentally unsustainable courses. In some cases, governments have decommissioned mega dams that were built in the last century. Murphy points to the example of the dams around the Columbia River in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (141). In many other cases, governments continue to engage in a frenzy of mega dam building, radically altering “the face of entire regions” and “inundating areas” after forcing local human populations to relocate (141).[8]

Many of the newest mega dams are being constructed in China and other countries in Asia (Murphy 2013, 141).

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