TH #7 Talking Dams
Towards Home #7
Talking Dams
July, 2000
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
-- Mario Savio, December 3, 1964 before Free Speech Movement demonstrators.
Traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Thailand is strenuous both on my body and my spirit. During my recent visit, I enjoyed seeing lots of friends and family, and returning to Thailand has been bittersweet with the excitement of renewing my work but with the fresh pain of leaving loved ones. I find that I can never really fully leave the U.S., and I know that when I relocate from Thailand a part of me will always stay here, just as part of me stays in Indiana, Spain, Houston, and DC.
This permanent presence in the places I’ve lived also binds me to the social and political issues there, and through friends and family in those places, to the places they also have never fully left. Doing work with the Burmese democracy movement can sometimes be all-consuming and isolating, and my visit to the U.S. had the effect of not only allowing me to renew friendships and connect with loved ones, but of pulling me out of that isolation and reminding me of the many ways people are working for social justice in their lives: working with people left without homes or food in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; giving legal defense to death row inmates in Texas; providing legal and social services to the increasing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in Indianapolis; doing HIV research; teaching, always under less-than-ideal conditions … . I suppose the list could be depressing, but I find it inspiring and the exposure to these issues invigorates me for the battles that I’ve chosen to fight.
In mid-June, I had further such inspiration upon my arrival in Thailand. Before returning to Chiang Mai, I attended the East and Southeast Asia Regional Meeting on Rivers, Dams, and People in Ubon Ratchatani ("Ubon" for short). It was a good meeting, bringing together activists and academics from 14 different countries. I'm learning lots about dams these days. They always seemed to me to be environmentally-friendly mechanisms for generating electricity or diverting water to improve irrigation. This view was naive, and the realities of large dams can be harsh, even lethal.
We held the conference in Ubon because it is in Isaan, or northeastern Thailand, a rural,
agricultural area where several harmful dams have been built. We visited villagers who have occupied a couple of the dams in non-violent protest. The Pak Mun dam is huge, and by blocking the river it created a reservoir that covered an area previously inhabited by several villages. The residents of those villages are now demanding they be compensated for the loss of their fishing and farming incomes and reparations be made for the loss of their traditional lifestyle. The dam produces about one third of the electricity it was planned to produce. It also includes a 
ridiculous mechanism called a "fish ladder" that is supposed to allow the fish that annually swim upstream to spawn to "climb" over the dam. The ladder has proved utterly useless and as a result the supply of fish has been depleted far beyond what was expected, further destroying the livelihoods of the villagers.
On the last day of the meeting, we visited Rasi Salai, another dam about two hours northwest of Ubon, and its problems are even more absurd. It was built to create a reservoir to provide a steady supply of water for irrigation to rice fields. However, the company that built the dam ran out of money before it could build the irrigation canals. Later, after the dam was constructed and experts studied possibilities for irrigation, they realized that below the reservoir was a salt dome, and that the resulting salinization of the water rendered the water useless for irrigation, so the Agriculture Ministry has refused to allow the canals to be built. In short, this huge, expensive dam literally serves no purpose. Meanwhile, thousands of villagers have lost their homes where their families have lived for generations.
The most moving part of the whole conference was a boat trip on the reservoir created by the Rasi Salai dam. Some of the villagers refuse to leave their homes and they are living on the roofs of their houses, saying they will die before they give up their homes to the dam. In fact, one villager died a month and a half ago. It is now the rainy season, so the reservoir has filled considerably. On the Saturday of our conference, the company responsible for the dam responded to the protests and opened the gates, so water is flowing more freely. It is too early to tell if the water will recede in time to save the villagers who are not leaving, and villagers are skeptical about how long the company will leave the dam gates open.
Aside from these dramatic and inspiring meetings with villagers, I also met with colleagues from throughout the region who will be able to assist me considerably on our campaign to stop the building of the Ta Sang Dam on Burma's Salween River. It is still in the planning stages, and the builders probably are still trying to secure loans to pay for the $3 billion+ project. The deals for international financing of these types of projects are made privately to avoid public scrutiny. We have figured out that the money for the dam will probably come from Japan, and some Japanese activists whom I met at the Ubon meeting, and who have experience uncovering the layers used to obscure such projects, have promised to help us out. Along with making these connections, I was also exposed to the problems caused by dams in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries in the region, along with strategies that many activists and academics are using to resist ill-conceived development projects. All in all, my return to Thailand was rather emotional and inspiring.
The exposure to this plethora of social justice issues – both in the Americas and in Asia – provokes me to look for connections, to find a way to use these collective experiences to gain collective wisdom (without falling into the mammoth-organization bureaucratic trap that plagues organizations like the United Nations). I don’t presume to have a blueprint for how to right all the wrongs, but the last couple of months have convinced me of one certain conclusion: open communication about the issues is essential. Freedoms of speech, press, and assembly go a long way toward promoting that collective knowledge, and those freedoms are far from universal. Thailand is a fairly open society; many of the East and Southeast Asian governments would not have allowed such a conference to take place on their soil. In the U.S., those hard-won freedoms came through struggle. And I hope that in Burma, when a transition to democracy comes, these freedoms are given priority so that collective and democratic decisions can be made regarding the many problems that will emerge after decades of military rule.
This permanent presence in the places I’ve lived also binds me to the social and political issues there, and through friends and family in those places, to the places they also have never fully left. Doing work with the Burmese democracy movement can sometimes be all-consuming and isolating, and my visit to the U.S. had the effect of not only allowing me to renew friendships and connect with loved ones, but of pulling me out of that isolation and reminding me of the many ways people are working for social justice in their lives: working with people left without homes or food in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; giving legal defense to death row inmates in Texas; providing legal and social services to the increasing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in Indianapolis; doing HIV research; teaching, always under less-than-ideal conditions … . I suppose the list could be depressing, but I find it inspiring and the exposure to these issues invigorates me for the battles that I’ve chosen to fight.
In mid-June, I had further such inspiration upon my arrival in Thailand. Before returning to Chiang Mai, I attended the East and Southeast Asia Regional Meeting on Rivers, Dams, and People in Ubon Ratchatani ("Ubon" for short). It was a good meeting, bringing together activists and academics from 14 different countries. I'm learning lots about dams these days. They always seemed to me to be environmentally-friendly mechanisms for generating electricity or diverting water to improve irrigation. This view was naive, and the realities of large dams can be harsh, even lethal.
We held the conference in Ubon because it is in Isaan, or northeastern Thailand, a rural,
agricultural area where several harmful dams have been built. We visited villagers who have occupied a couple of the dams in non-violent protest. The Pak Mun dam is huge, and by blocking the river it created a reservoir that covered an area previously inhabited by several villages. The residents of those villages are now demanding they be compensated for the loss of their fishing and farming incomes and reparations be made for the loss of their traditional lifestyle. The dam produces about one third of the electricity it was planned to produce. It also includes a 
ridiculous mechanism called a "fish ladder" that is supposed to allow the fish that annually swim upstream to spawn to "climb" over the dam. The ladder has proved utterly useless and as a result the supply of fish has been depleted far beyond what was expected, further destroying the livelihoods of the villagers.On the last day of the meeting, we visited Rasi Salai, another dam about two hours northwest of Ubon, and its problems are even more absurd. It was built to create a reservoir to provide a steady supply of water for irrigation to rice fields. However, the company that built the dam ran out of money before it could build the irrigation canals. Later, after the dam was constructed and experts studied possibilities for irrigation, they realized that below the reservoir was a salt dome, and that the resulting salinization of the water rendered the water useless for irrigation, so the Agriculture Ministry has refused to allow the canals to be built. In short, this huge, expensive dam literally serves no purpose. Meanwhile, thousands of villagers have lost their homes where their families have lived for generations.
The most moving part of the whole conference was a boat trip on the reservoir created by the Rasi Salai dam. Some of the villagers refuse to leave their homes and they are living on the roofs of their houses, saying they will die before they give up their homes to the dam. In fact, one villager died a month and a half ago. It is now the rainy season, so the reservoir has filled considerably. On the Saturday of our conference, the company responsible for the dam responded to the protests and opened the gates, so water is flowing more freely. It is too early to tell if the water will recede in time to save the villagers who are not leaving, and villagers are skeptical about how long the company will leave the dam gates open.
Aside from these dramatic and inspiring meetings with villagers, I also met with colleagues from throughout the region who will be able to assist me considerably on our campaign to stop the building of the Ta Sang Dam on Burma's Salween River. It is still in the planning stages, and the builders probably are still trying to secure loans to pay for the $3 billion+ project. The deals for international financing of these types of projects are made privately to avoid public scrutiny. We have figured out that the money for the dam will probably come from Japan, and some Japanese activists whom I met at the Ubon meeting, and who have experience uncovering the layers used to obscure such projects, have promised to help us out. Along with making these connections, I was also exposed to the problems caused by dams in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries in the region, along with strategies that many activists and academics are using to resist ill-conceived development projects. All in all, my return to Thailand was rather emotional and inspiring.
The exposure to this plethora of social justice issues – both in the Americas and in Asia – provokes me to look for connections, to find a way to use these collective experiences to gain collective wisdom (without falling into the mammoth-organization bureaucratic trap that plagues organizations like the United Nations). I don’t presume to have a blueprint for how to right all the wrongs, but the last couple of months have convinced me of one certain conclusion: open communication about the issues is essential. Freedoms of speech, press, and assembly go a long way toward promoting that collective knowledge, and those freedoms are far from universal. Thailand is a fairly open society; many of the East and Southeast Asian governments would not have allowed such a conference to take place on their soil. In the U.S., those hard-won freedoms came through struggle. And I hope that in Burma, when a transition to democracy comes, these freedoms are given priority so that collective and democratic decisions can be made regarding the many problems that will emerge after decades of military rule.
posted by PeaJayPee @ 3:10 PM
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