The Spirit Of The Age

Ecologist, The, July, 2000 by Fred Pearce

It was discussing climate change during the African droughts of the mid-1970s, at least 10 years before the topic became common currency. The world woke up to the crisis in the world's rainforests in the late 1980s, but look through The Ecologist and you find a cover feature entitled 'Who's destroying the rainforests -- peasants or profits?' back in 1982. Not only had it identified a critical global problem, it had tied down a central dilemma in addressing it.

Or take the issue of large dams. For many years environmentalists had liked dams. They appeared to be temples of clean, renewable energy. They provided water for the 'greening of the deserts'. A few lovers of wilderness shed tears over the loss of a particularly beautiful valley beneath a reservoir. But wider environmental and social issues were barely discussed. Until, that is, Goldsmith and Hildyard went to work.

It was around 1980 that Goldsmith, during one of his periodic bouts of wanderlust, stumbled on plans to flood valleys in Sri Lanka for a complex of hydroelectric dams known as the Mahaweli scheme. He was appalled at the destructive folly of it. 'These dams destroy so much in return for a few decades of electricity,' he said later. 'I came back from Sri Lanka determined to fight such projects.'

And he did, to immense effect. Over the next four years, he and Hildyard commissioned an extraordinary series of papers from around the world on the social and environmental impacts of large dams. What emerged was a picture that previously very few had even suspected -- that most dams in most places at most times do more harm than good, using State power to steal the ecological wealth of rivers from poor, rural communities and redistribute it to the rich, urban and landed. In case after case, the academic contributors demonstrated the scale of environmental destruction affecting the lives of millions of people, the spread of disease and corruption and the unfulfilled promises of the engineers.

Goldsmith and Hildyard underlined these themes in a three-volume book published in 1985, which became a seminal text for what has become a worldwide movement to oppose large dams. As Phil Williams, a hydrologist from California, put it in his introduction to The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: 'Dams transform the social life of a country, destroying indigenous, traditional cultures and accelerating the change to a cash economy centred on cities... The promise of radically changing a country's economy is frequently used to justify the destruction of communities, ecosystems and traditional agricultural systems.'

This analysis is now accepted wisdom in the environment movement. But 20 years ago, it was not. And it was the energy and single-mindedness of The Ecologist's critique that set the new paradigm. Many 1990s campaigners against dams on the Narmada in India or the Three Gorges mega-project in China, US greens working to tear down old dams in the mid-west, and British opponents of the Ilisu dam on the River Tigris in Turkey, will be unaware that in all probability none of this would have happened but for The Ecologist's pioneering work.