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Journalism of Courage
Mao Tse-tung famously declared 8220;man must conquer nature,8221; and his political heirs have followed his dictum zealously by building dams and other gigantic projects that have altered the landscape of China.
But May8217;s deadly earthquake may tilt the balance of public opinion in favour of a more cautious and environmentally conscious approach to such development.
The threat of flash floods has forced tens of thousands of traumatised quake survivors to relocate. The dams also prevented rescue workers from navigating the rivers to reach victims in inaccessible areas.
Many Chinese ascribe to the belief that natural disasters are the result of human failings and point to the widespread construction of dams as a possible culprit. The Min River, a tributary of the Yangtze River that runs through the path of destruction, is one of the most dammed-up rivers in the country.
Geologists long have warned of the danger of building dams in earthquake-prone locations. Not only can the structures collapse, but some tremors are believed to have been triggered by the weight of a dam8217;s reservoir.
8220;We don8217;t want to appear to benefit from human catastrophe by pushing an agenda, but we are making information about earthquakes and dams available,8221; said Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers of Berkeley, California.
Bosshard said that three people he met on a visit to Beijing this week separately predicted that the Chinese government would reconsider its aggressive dam-building programme. It is too late to stop China8217;s notorious Three Gorges Dam, the world8217;s largest hydroelectric power project, at a cost of 30 billion and more than 1 million people displaced. But environmentalists are likely to fight another controversial dam planned for the Nu River in a quake-prone location near the border with Myanmar.
Also, within days of the magnitude-7.9 quake on May 12, PetroChina announced it would reconsider its plans for a 5.5 billion refinery and petrochemical plant in Pengzhou, 30 miles from the epicentre.
Sichuan province8217;s environmentalists have been fighting dams for years. In 2003, they stopped a project that was to be built in Dujiangyan on the grounds it would destroy a 2,000-year-old irrigation system that is a World Heritage Site. But they could not block the Zipingpu Dam, which opened two years ago over the objections of the Sichuan Seismological Bureau. Zipingpu sustained severe cracks on May 12 even though it was built to the highest quake-resistant standards.
Dams are something of an obsession for the burgeoning Chinese environmental movement. They are at once the most vivid example of Mao8217;s call to reshape nature and a symbol of greed in the market economy. Many of the dams built in the last decade are to satisfy the nation8217;s hunger for hydroelectric power and to generate revenue for local government.
Dai Qing, a writer who was imprisoned after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989 and now devotes herself to fighting the construction of dams, said, 8220;We must look carefully at how dams impact earthquakes and how earthquakes impact dams.8221;
