Living with a Dam (original) (raw)
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Hydropower has commonly been promoted as an environmentally friendly and renewable energy resource. Despite this, the major negative social and ecological impacts on the environment and its local inhabitants have been well established for a long time, as well as the high risks for large-scale disasters caused by hydropower dam failures. Drawing on a qualitative study that focuses on the Lule River in Sweden, this article analyses the cultural politics of emotions with regard to dams, reservoirs, safety and human security. Annually between one and two major dam failures occur around the world, with major consequences for human and non-human lives, the environment and the economy, and the issue has been addressed in policy making and within the work of power companies since the 1970's. However, more people die due to accidents on dams and reservoirs than due to dam failures. In Sweden, the number of hydropower regulation related deaths within the demographically small municipality of Jokkmokk, where a major part of Sweden's hydropower is being produced, is on average 0,02 per cent per year, or 1-2 persons, which would correspond to 180-360 deaths in the Swedish capital Stockholm. Yet, there are no calls for inquiries, investigations and measurements to ensure public safety around dams in Sweden. Linking these two aspects on hydropower dams and safety through the concept of human security we identify a void of understanding and valuing the importance of humans' – operators-lived experiences and invested emotions in the work to avoid dam failures, accidents on the reservoirs and loss of lives. We address the fact that the operators live and are related to the inhabitants of the regulated Lule River and what role this may play in enhanced human security. We argue that technical reports and studies on dam safety are written in a way that invokes false emotions of control, safety and security for inhabitants as well as political decision makers. New technologies for camera surveillance and monitoring provide opportunities to assemble data on a dam and the water flowing through it (seepage), with the purpose to enhance safety. However, we suggest that these systems actually may produce false emotions of safety and security, reinforcing a paradigm of perceived control of nature's forces and thereby may contribute to decreased safety and human security.
Full article available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7\_4 Chapter Book: Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities, Part of the series Crossroads of Knowledge pp 47-79 Challenging the modern ideal of human bodies as being in control both of bodies of nature and of the bodies of technology made to control nature, this chapter considers the vulnerability of large-scale hydropower dams and the intimate interdependencies between dam bodies, water bodies, and human bodies. It proposes a water-centered, rather than human-centered, reading of rivers and in particular of dammed rivers, through an understanding of hydropower dams as vulnerable bodies. Once constructed by human beings, hydropower dams take on a life of their own and become living organisms as they age, interact with land and rivers, and withstand and react to changing environmental conditions. This chapter also discusses processes of knowledge production in which different bodies of knowledge come to be perceived as embodied or disembodied and are granted status as primitive or scientific. Taking her point of departure in her own embodied history, the author seeks to retrace indigenous Sámi understandings of human cultural interconnectedness with nature. With a focus on the specific river Julevädno running through Sápmi in the north of Sweden, the chapter draws attention to the unpredictable agency of water and the porosity of human bodies, emphasizing risk and vulnerability as essential elements of their interrelation.
While two indispensable components of life, water and development, continue to shape each other constantly, human beings have always attempted to control water for food supply, irrigation, energy etc. throughout history. Huge dam and hydroelectric power plant projects have been initiated as one of the most important elements of development, an idea that was initiated in Western countries, and then 'exported' to developing countries particularly following the Industrial Revolution. The result is almost no freely flowing rivers remaining on Earth. There are many benefits these power plants provide for requirements of the modern life, while rapidly growing world population and gradually decreasing freshwater resources, their effects on the ecosystems surrounding rivers, as well as their social, cultural and environmental effects are not taken into account, which, as a result, make the alleged clean and renewable hydroelectric energy not sustainable. This study discusses hydroelectric power plants (HEPPs) within the framework of Development and Ecology from an anthropological perspective and evaluates the impact of two river-type hydroelectric plants on the daily lives of local people in the Aksu Valley located at the İspir District of Erzurum.
The Flaky Accretions of Infrastructure: Sociotechnical Systems, Citizenship, and the Water Supply
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2021
The convergence of networked digital infrastructures and built environments have given rise to the "urban user", a conflation of "the user" and "the resident" or "the citizen". The urban user and the city infrastructures are mutually constituted phenomena formed through the interactions between them. In this research, we contribute an ethnographic study that focuses on the everyday interactions between the urban user and water infrastructures in Pune, India. Using Nikhil Anand's concept of "hydraulic citizenship" to analyze our ethnographic data, we showcase the mutually constitutive process of infrastructuring and subjectivization of the "citizen", bringing attention to the ad hoc, heterogeneously constituted water infrastructures in Pune that aspire to be "smart" even before becoming functional infrastructures. In doing so, we hope to expand possible research trajectories within smart city research agendas b...
Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography, 2012
This paper uses a case study on the evolution of the Rhine river delta to illustrate the coevolution of the environment, the technology used to exploit it, and the institutions governing it. Three strands are interwoven: (1) Achieving equilibrium between protecting and utilizing land is difficult. In this area, as a result of exploitation, agriculture on fertile peat is succeeded by stock raising on infertile peat, peat extraction, inundation, and drainage to regain fertile soil. (2) In the dynamic between collective and individual action that accompanies these changes, individuals beget institutions and institutions beget individuals. (3) New technologies are invented, helping overcome challenges posed by the natural environment. Their unexpected consequences undermine the solutions found, leading to new technologies, etc. The ultimate cause is the interaction between human cognition and action. Our cognition is limited in the number of dimensions it can simultaneously handle, and our action (directly or indirectly) affects all the dimensions of the complex adaptive system that is the environment, triggering unintended consequences, and new actions. This feedback takes the system from perceived challenges to solutions to new, unintended challenges, driving the region further and further from its point of departure, towards the bottom of the sea.
Canals Spawn Dams? Exploring the Filiation of Hydraulic Infrastructure
Environment and History, 2010
This article studies the aetiology underlying water management by exploring the social hermeneutics that determined its construction. It details how science, technology and political relations construct each other mutually, both producing and harnessing the scientific discourse on the environment. Supply management continues to prevail, in spite of contradictory claims, through the filiation process linking successive generations of water infrastructure. The case study of the Neste Canal inducing the construction of the Charlas Dam, allows the identification of three types of mechanisms participating in the construction of water deficits that now lead both proponents and opponents of dam construction to harness the environmental discourse. The first lies in the social construction of water science and technology. The second lies in the evolution of power relations among the various actors. The third lies in the insertion of the 'expert' within these power relations.
Canal Spawn Dams? Exploring the Filiation of Hydraulic Infrastructure
2010
This article studies the aetiology underlying water management by exploring the social hermeneutics that determined its construction. It details how science, technology and political relations construct each other mutually, both producing and harnessing the scientific discourse on the environment. Supply management continues to prevail, in spite of contradictory claims, through the filiation process linking successive generations of water infrastructure. The case study of the Neste Canal inducing the construction of the Charlas Dam, allows the identification of three types of mechanisms participating in the construction of water deficits that now lead both proponents and opponents of dam construction to harness the environmental discourse. The first lies in the social construction of water science and technology. The second lies in the evolution of power relations among the various actors. The third lies in the insertion of the ‘expert’ within these power relations.
Technology in Society, 2014
Today, technological innovation is often called upon to deliver solutions to the sustainable development challenges that the world faces. The integration of different technological systems is promoted as a main option for that goal. By integrating systems, waste from one system can be used as feedstock for another system, equipment can be used more efficiently by economies of scale, and/or the service that can be provided to customers, can increase. Integration of technological systems is not just a technological challenge. Systems integration creates new social interdependencies which imply that the previously unrelated systems lose part of their autonomy. Autonomy of a system is a valuable asset that allows a system some flexibility when it is confronted with changing conditions. Integration implies that institutional frameworks have to be created to balance the interests of previously unrelated actors. Moreover, the technological as well as the social complexity of an integrating system increases, which makes it harder to manage. This paper studies the process of systems integration and its related process of creating new institutional frameworks by analyzing the introduction of large scale hydropower in Western Sweden and developments that were triggered in this complex systems integration. In 1910, the first large scale hydropower station was opened in the Göta Älv river at Trollhättan. The hydropower station was close to the Gothenburg-Stockholm railway line, which was planned to be electrified. The seasonal excess of electricity was sold at a low price. This attracted industries that depended on cheap electricity, and Trollhättan became a center for metallurgical and electrochemical industry. The hydropower plant owners aimed at completely regulating the river in order to optimize power production. However, this implied that the interests of riparians, agriculture, river transport and fisheries would become subordinate to power production. Creating an institutional framework for this integration lasted 21 years. This historical analysis identifies three main elements which enabled (or impeded) systems integration. These were: spatial conditions that provided options for integration, expected efficiency gains in relation to the anticipated loss of autonomy for the integrating systems, social processes among the actors involved. Different degrees as well as different types of systems integration were discerned and the paper develops a typology of systems integration processes.
Teoria e Sociedade, 2006
Development projects conceived within policies of economic growth concentrate "environmental space". The homogenization they promote in space reflects a monocultural state of mind that threats a diversity of non-industrialized modes of living and uses of resources. It generates an unequal ecological distribution. This is the case of hydroelectric dams that flood protected areas and impose a compulsory displacement of riverside dwellers (family agriculture, indigenous and ex-slaves communities etc.). From the research experience in Minas Gerais, this article analyses the environmental licensing process related to construction of dams as a field of conflicts around the social appropiation of nature. In the struggle to define the users and meanings of territories, there are, on the one hand, the rural communities affected by such projects and, on the other hand, the Electric Sector. These actors represent two different rationalities in dipute: for local people, the land represents family and community heritage which are kept by collective memory and rules of using and sharing the resources. From a market perspective, the Electric Sector understands the territory as propoerty, therefore as a commodity. In such a field os struggles, where different positions sustain unequal forces, uneven and unsustainable social and environmental policies are perpetuated.
SHARING IN ACTION: BOGDANOV, THE LIVING EXPERIENCE AND THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPT OF THE ENVIRONMENT
The Spherical Book
This paper discusses the novelty of Aleksandr Bogdanov's approach, which combines the systemic and cybernetic perspectives employed in his Tektology, the general science of organization (1913–1922). In this work Bogdanov places particular emphasis on the concept of the environment and situates the process of 'organization' in a shared social context. The interaction among social agents, and between them and their contextual surroundings, implies a cybernetic relationship. The environment is, in fact, regarded both in terms of its influence in shaping human living conditions and in its plasticity in being transformed by human labour for specific purposes. Likewise, in Tektology, Bogdanov considers not only the social context but also biological and ecological systems that foster an emergent relationship between organisms and their environments. On the one hand, the environment favours biological organisms most well adapted to its conditions; on the other hand, the environment is seen as a portion of space (ecosystem) in which populations live and continuously modify the biogeochemical conditions of that system. By referring to biological, ecological and cognitive levels of cybernetic organization, I argue that Bogdanov's tektological polymorphic idea of the environment embraces different dimensions of the systemic discourse, and can also be useful to understand the process of knowledge creation underlying the idea of a proletarian culture.