• Tag Archives dams

  • In The Right Spot After All

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    “To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

    Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

    Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

    Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

    Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

    In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dreams Faith and Spirituality GeekWorld Great Work Humanities Myth and Story Politics 📎and tagged

  • Losing a Friend, More on Dams

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    “In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something…metaphysically sinister….the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

    John McPhee Encounters with the Archdruid (1971)

    We lost half a cedar tree in our backyard to heavy snow and wind.  We nurtured this tree from a small cedar bush into a two trunk tree that shaded our small patch of grass just beyond the deck.  These early heavy snows can be hard on evergreens since they retain needles throughout the winter, making them vulnerable to the wet and often large snow falls of late fall.  We’ll have a chance to do something new out there come spring.  Kate wants a lilac tree.

    Here’s another thing about dams.  They generate, in addition to hydroelectric power, strong feelings.  People love’em or hate’m.  After they are built, they often become so much a part of the local ecology that people defend them from destruction with much the same fervor that folks oppose their construction in the first place.

    There are a multitude of problems created by dams:  river flow is often altered and in turn alters the ecology both upstream and downstream, sediment pools at the base of dams robbing downstream deltas of needed material, archaeological sites can be destroyed or rendered extremely difficult to discover, populations are often displaced and, often, are denied access to the power produced by the dams which relocated them.

    Equity questions abound as in the case of waters diverted to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the arid Western states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona and as in the case of a dam on the Zambezi river, built by Mozambique but because it needs military protection from rebel forces, forced to sell its electricity to South Africa at 1/7th of the world price.  Dams concentrate capital and political power in often unhealthy ways, especially in third world countries and especially when used as elements of a geopolitical strategy by such bureaucracies as the US Bureau of Reclamation.

    More as the week goes on.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Friends Garden Great Work Our Land and Home Politics Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • By A Dam Site

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                     Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    Once in a while it’s bracing to throw yourself in the deep end and I did that today.  I went to a conference titled  Experiments on Rivers:  the Consequences of Dams.  I realized how little consideration I’d given to dams by the end of the day.  I’ll just give you one example and it came in the first three minutes of the conference in a presentation from Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, headquartered at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, location of the conference.  After four slides and a technical explanation, Efi told us that of the 40 large river deltas in the world surveyed in a recent scientific study, 27 of them had much less sediment than the same deltas had before the construction of dams begun largely in the 1950’s.

    What’s the big deal?  Well, it turns out that all deltas are subsiding, that is, sinking.  The thing that keeps the deltas and the land forms dependent on or within them from getting inundated is the build up of sediment; sediment now significantly blocked in 27 cases by upstream dams.  Think global sea level rise, then put the two together.  Efi’s crowd predicts that without solving the sediment deposit drought New Orleans (why does everything focus on the Big Easy?) will be gone by 2100.  Whoa.

    I’ll drop other information in throughout the week so I don’t overload ancientrails with dam related topics.

    The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory*, created in 1938, has run continuously since then, churning out (ha, ha) hydraulic studies for dams, transportation studies and much, much more.  The tour of the wind tunnel (also a from of hydraulics), delta modeling and stream and river bed modeling was worth the time to attend the conference.  This is real science done with made up tools, including a pipe cleaner forest and a wooden and plexiglass model of downtown Minneapolis.

    *SAFL is the world’s only fluid-mechanics laboratory that uses a natural waterfall as its prime water source. For over 70 years researchers from around the world have been visiting our unique location on an island in the Mississippi River to conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water resources, and energy-related problems. We would like to extend our warmest invitation to visit our facilities and talk with our research staff and students.


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  • Dams

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                               Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

    Headed out early today to a UofM Institute for Advanced Studies conference on dams.  The focus is on dams as an area of study, but the sub rosa agenda covers the problems dams pose, not only ecologically I learned yesterday at the keynote lecture, but also politically and “extra-scientifically.”  Extra-scientific refers to the ways good science gets bent by political objectives into motivation for or rationale for something motivated by other factors, often geopolitical in nature.

    Gotta write here about my tour yesterday for the Rochester Friends.  I kept losing folks as the tour went on and I didn’t feel I connected with them.  Left me in a down place, but determined to do a better job on my next Thaw tour.

    A winter storm watch posted for Andover, 6″ of wet snow.  About time.


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