by Philip M. Fearnside, Ph.D.
The Three Gorges Project would produce the world’s largest dam-displaced population (500,000 – 1,200,000 people), even at the lowest reservoir operating level nominally under consideration. Other Chinese dams have forced major resettlements – for example, the Danjiangkou Dam on the Han River (380,000), and the Sanmenxia Dam on the Yellow River (320,000).1 Outside China, the governments of Egypt and Sudan displaced 100,000 people to make way for the Aswan High Dam.
Nine experts were invited by Probe International to review the Canadian dam builders’ Three Gorges Water Control Project Feasibility Study. In this chapter, the editors summarize their key findings. The nine chapters to follow provide our experts’ detailed analysis.
On April 3, 1992, China’s National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, erupted in a display of opposition unprecedented for this normally rubber-stamp body. The outburst was the latest in the decades-long dispute over the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River.
by Gráinne Ryder
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.
by Dai Qing
by Niu Kangsheng
About the Editors
Gráinne Ryder worked as an engineer in Thailand on village water supply projects for three years before joining Probe International in 1987 as a water resources researcher. She headed an international effort to stop the Three Gorges Project until 1990 when she returned to Thailand to coordinate a campaign against a series of dams on the Mekong River.
We wish to give special thanks to Patricia Adams for her rigorous editorial assistance, and her unflagging enthusiasm for the book. Special thanks also to Lawrence Solomon, for his patience and guidance throughout preparation of the book, for his expert help with writing and editing, and for his humour when driving a point home.
(March 19, 2009) A year after phillipine President Marcos and his first lady were forced from office, the U.S.
(March 19, 2009) Few know with confidence how the universe came into being but if God had said `let there be light’ while in Colombia, He would not have had enough money left for the rest of creation. Because the truth is that in a country where there are projects which have cost a lot, few have cost as much as the expansion of the electric sector during the last ten years.
(March 18, 2009) Most taxpayers in the rich industrialized countries believe, as the Pearson Commission inquiry into foreign aid believed, that "it is only right for those who have to share with those who have not." Much of the Western World’s sharing, though, has been in the form of loans, not gifts. The Third World has borrowed about one-third of the $400 billion in foreign aid that it has received from the rich countries’ national aid agencies.
(March 18, 2009) ONE YEAR BEFORE MEXICO touched off the Third World’s debt crisis by suspending payments to foreign creditors, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rose proudly to announce in the House of Commons that her government had just committed millions to the Mexican government to build the $2 billion Sicartsa steel plant:
(March 18, 2009) The Environment Strikes Back: The Economy
The Tragedies of the Commons
Patricia Adams
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
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