The End Is Nigh: Grief and the Big-Dam Era
The first email in my inbox this morning reads, “And now, the end is near.”
Frightening, like the doomsday warning on a hand-painted sandwich board. Clicking in, I see, “It’s time for the final curtain.” Worse and worse, until I read on: it’s the last day this season to order red grapefruit from citrus farmers I follow in the southern California desert.
Why do I follow them? I love the valley where they grow their sweet grapefruit. Do I buy their citrus much? Yes, when I visit the honor-system stand where they’ve sold bags of fruit for at least six decades. For much of that time, I’ve wondered when the end would come—the end to irrigating from a depleted groundwater table, the end of the desert grapefruit farm.
Related endings crop up everywhere. In 2016, I wrote an op-ed for Undark magazine about lessons learned from the 1970s New Melones Dam project on the Stanislaus River. When published, the piece had been retitled, “The Big Dam Era Is Not Over." A bit of a non sequitur, considering that my argument was that big dams fail to deliver and that a proposed impoundment in northeast British Columbia should not be built. Just look at California’s New Melones, the poster child of “all that can go wrong with a project,” per the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Site C dam on the Peace River in the upper Mackenzie River watershed was a hot topic of conversation in 2014 and 2015, when I studied and lectured in Canada. Everywhere I went, people asked what I thought of the pending project. Planned since the 1970s, Site C would be “a source of clean, reliable, and affordable electricity for more than 100 years,” according to B.C. Hydro, the utility behind the project. Scientists watching this third dam on the 1,200-mile-long Peace scoffed at that claim. As did I. Site C was sure to fall short of producing 35 percent of the energy of the Peace River’s existing dams with only 5 percent of their reservoir area. Instead, the project would destroy vital natural, cultural, and climatic resources for no good reason.
Why should we care about a dam that’s way up in B.C.? It would flood only a fraction of North America’s second-largest watershed—plenty more of the Mackenzie flows free. Plus, one could say that Canada needs the power. B.C. suffers from drought and wildfire; it needs the water storage. It needs the jobs.
Grief is one reason to care. For both new and experienced river advocates everywhere, grief is a top reason.
We who have loved and lost wild rivers like the Stanislaus live with memories of their moods. In our hearts the living waters still flow high and exciting or murmur by in perfect peace. And we suffer, knowing we’ll not experience such intimate places again in this life. For anyone yet to see a beloved home go underwater, I will say that the anguish of it wounds like a knife cut. The drowning creates indelible absence, and a shadow persists in its place.
Taken in 1976 by Bill Center. This photo shows kayakers and rafters on the Stanislaus River before the New Melones Dam.
Grief over loss has its own journey in us. In terms of New Melones, I remember going through the five stages of grief documented by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. First, I felt certain that no one would really flood such a river, with all its beauty and healing. Still, earthmovers rolled into the lower canyon, so I responded with angry letters to legislators and bitter complaints to friends, family, any poor soul who would listen. Then, as water backed up behind the new dam, I stood with Friends of the River at their witness camp, chanting, “Parrott’s Ferry is our limit!” That was the best deal we could offer.
Reservoir waters rose past that limit. I sank into sadness and turned away, toward an out-of-state job. Over time, I had to accept what had happened, though I prayed for the river to return. All that was left, I felt certain, was the crying.
But I have since learned that working with lessons tied to powerful grief helps to transform it. Making meaning of our loss helps us honor it and move on to feelings of peace and hope.
Taken in January 2016 by Sarah Vardaro. The drought shrunk the New Melones reservoir and exposed the profound siltation, erosion, and complete destruction of the Stanislaus river’s ecosystem.
It’s hard to make meaning of the disappearance of some of the earth’s most beautiful ecosystems, especially when their loss feels senseless: their destruction was based on outdated data sets, so their replacements don't perform as promised as aridification continues in the West. Impoundments fill with silt and sand several decades or even centuries sooner than predicted. Dams become candidates for removal, a public admission that they don’t work well and perhaps never did.
Even the most unimaginable losses don’t have to be in vain. As we apply the lessons learned on the Stanislaus River, for instance, to saving other wild places, we honor that beautiful, wise canyon in significant ways. We see the gifts of its loss contributing to not only the healing of the planet, but also to the healing of our own broken hearts.
It’s important work that organizations like Friends of the River, American Rivers, and Restoring the Stanislaus River do as they challenge old modes of water storage. Questioning outdated projects and retrofits is not just environmental work—which is reason enough to do it—it’s also grief work. It’s mental-health work, social-justice work, truth-and-reconciliation work.
So, we revisit data and cost:benefit analyses when they need another look. We unify with communities who stand up for a valley or river canyon, no matter how far from home. We put forward workable compromises and untried conservation efforts. We take old-school, aboveground water solutions off autopilot.
Mother Rapids at sunset, Stanislaus River, photo by Bruce Raley, 1979.
We stand with the indigenous, environmental, recreational, research, and agricultural communities opposed to projects like Site C. Under construction now, B.C.’s dam will flood unceded lands of the Treaty 8 First Nations with its bread-basket farms, subsistence-hunting grounds, and indigenous burial sites. The stilled waters will produce climate-intensive methane at many times (studies show perhaps 100 times) the rate of undammed reaches. The project will run over budget (projected costs have already shot up from $10.7 billion to $16 billion due to mounting geotechnical issues).
The entire scenario sounds too familiar to ignore.
Although I didn’t choose the title for “The Big Dam Era Is Not Over,” I do get it: it’s a warning. For the health of our changed world, that era isn’t over, but it should be. Like the fabled sandwich board that demands “Repent—The End Is Nigh," we go on wearing our losses and their lessons for all to see and consider. In this way we honor them, learn from them, make meaning of them with deep caring and commitment—and carry on.
Resources
The Big Dam Era Is Not Over, Becca Lawton, Undark
