This book is an updated and expanded edition of Damming
The Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don’t Want You To Know, a critique
of a Canadian government-World Bank feasibility study of China’s Three
Gorges Dam. Originally published in September 1990, this book exposed
the flawed analyses and compromised calculations evident in the
official justification of a large dam project. Since the first edition
was published, others have discovered the same defects in other
justifications of other large dam projects.

An independent review of the World Bank-financed
Sardar Sarovar Dam on India’s Narmada River discovered, as did this
book’s contributors, that the dam builders failed to employ adequate
hydrologic data; that they did not properly consider the backwater
effects of the dam, or the downstream impacts of the dam on the people,
the estuary and fish stocks; that they exhibited gross delinquency in
the handling of environmental matters; and that they failed to prove
that the dam would perform as planned. “Assertions,” the independent
reviewers revealed in their 1992 book entitled Sardar Sarovar: The
Report of the Independent Review, “have been substituted for analysis.”

The importance of these two independent critiques cannot be overstated.

They
have exposed a disturbing pattern of omissions, errors, and biases in
the official justifications of the dam builders – flaws that have
thrived under the cloak of secrecy that shielded them from the light of
public scrutiny. Until these two independent critiques were published,
the international dam builders – governments, corporations, and
international aid agencies – could justify their dams in the name of
development and with claims to the national interest, without fear of
challenge from a public kept ignorant of their calculations. Now these
two critiques have exposed that the dam builders could justify their
dams only by denigrating the cultural values of the people affected, by
discounting current economic activity in the ecosystems they propose to
destroy, by treating the environment as dispensable, by making
unscientific and uneconomic choices, and most important, by carelessly
or over-confidently assigning risks to others who would not assume
those risks for themselves.

The relevance of these two independent critiques
go far beyond the Three Gorges and Sardar Sarovar dams, making sense of
the bad technical and financial record of large dams around the world,
and challenging the wisdom of other large dams, unbuilt but on the
drawing boards of the international agencies.

Events have made a second edition of Damming The Three Gorges a necessity.

On
April 3, 1992, China’s National People’s Congress gave formal, though
not unanimous, approval to the Three Gorges Dam. In its drive for
international financing, the Chinese authorities cite the Canadian
feasibility study which recommended that the dam would be safe and
beneficial. The independent experts who have contributed to this book
concluded the opposite: the Canadian feasibility study failed to prove
that the Three Gorges Dam was either safe or beneficial.

In the interest of an informed public debate, we reprint this
second edition of Damming The Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don’t
Want You To Know. A new chapter on the problem of sedimentation –
which threatens to cripple the dam – has been added, as has a chronicle
of the significant political events leading to the approval of the Three
Gorges Dam on the mighty Yangtze.

Continue to Introduction

Back to
Foreword 2nd Edition