Steven Hawley

What is a river? This might sound like a simple question: "the water passing through their banks!" you might exclaim. Greek philosopher Heraclitus pondered this question too, and came up with the now-aphoristic: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." Well, we don't step in the same water, but I would argue that the permanence of a river isn't based on a given set of molecules, just as the permanence of a human isn't based on the materials cycling through our bodies in any given moment.

To begin to answer this questions, we might first ask, "what is the lifetime of a river?" Although there are various ways to answer this question, most rivers live for millions of years - until the tectonic conditions that brought about their creation shift so dramatically so as to bring about their death.

Given this lifetime, it becomes obvious that "the water between the banks" is only the most instantaneous of definitions. As is apparent from Lidar maps of rivers over the terms of even just thousands of years, a floodplain is very much also part of the body of the river. Just as if you were to take a random one-second chunk of your lifetime to establish your whereabouts-you might be in bed, or in your home-it can be misleading to look at the past hundred years of a river's existence, as this only represents a minute instant in their lifetime.

What about subsurface waters? In streams, anywhere between 50% and 95% of the water passing through occurs under the substrate (according to Ben Goldfarb's book, "Eager"). Is this also part of the body of the river?

And what about tributaries? Is a river also their tributaries? Well, are our capillaries part of our bodies? I think most people would answer in the affirmative.

Of course, to be a useful concept, rivers do have boundaries. At their mouths, their waters and banks eventually merge with the vastness of the oceans, and oceans are very much not rivers. Their headwaters eventually give way to ridges and mountaintops, which are also not rivers. Their substrates eventually give way to bedrock and deeper strata of the earth's mantels, which are not rivers.

Thus far, I've only spoken to the body of the river. Rivers also have spirits and souls, but to discuss such things is more a matter of poetry and theology. Go out with an angler or a kayaker or a swimmer if you've like to start to appreciate the spirit of rivers.

Philosopher Timothy Morton coined the term "hyperobject" in 2010, to refer to the vastness and incomprehensibility of climate change.

Hyperobjects have five characteristics:
1. Viscous: adhering to other things they touch.
2. Molten: vexing to Newtonian mechanics.
3. Nonlocal: massively distributed in time and space.
4. Phased: existing in high-dimensional space.
5. Interobjective: formed by relationships between multiple objects.

Given the meditation above, all of these characteristics start to sound very much like what it is to be a river:
1. Viscous: in a terrestrial landscape, it is challenging to escape the boundaries of a river, when taking into account their floodplain, tributaries, etc.
2. Molten: returning to the Lidar maps again, the path of a river is endlessly writhing and snaking through a landscape.
3. Nonlocal: watersheds vary in size from a few acres along craggy coastline, up to more than a million square miles, but are generally vast in time and space from a human perspective.
4. Phased: the beingness of a river only begins to come into focus when viewed from a higher-dimensional perspective.
5. Interobjective: rivers are composed of in-betweens, between earth and sky, between mountains and oceans, between banks, between geological eras.

Coming from an animist perspective, a river is very much a being, not an object, and so I would suggest we arrive at the term "hyperbeing" to begin to relate to the ontology of rivers.

This concept of rivers as hyperbeings isn't new; it is common to human cultures through history, even if the words are new. To minimize the risk of appropriation, I'll take a pop-culture reference: Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away." It wasn't until my second time watching the film (after it was pointed out to me by David Abram) that "Spirited Away" is a film about rivers, river spirits, and river gods. Although the protagonist is a human girl, Chihiro, many of her significant encounters are with river spirits. Her main companion and accomplice, Haku, ends up being the spirit of the Kohaku River - the river of Chihiro's childhood, and the river that saved her life, and a river now displaced by a development. While working in the bath house, Chihiro encounters other river spirits, including one who is initially seen as stink spirit. Chiriho persists in attending to this spirit, and with a proper cleanup, they are revealed as Kawa no Kami, king of the river gods.

To return to Morton's terminology - Miyazaki's employment of kami (the spirit world of Japanese Shinto) and the bathhouse is a brilliant illustration of the phased nature of hyperbeings. These rivers that have been so vital to Chihiro's life are also sometimes people, are also sometimes dragons, and require human care to thrive. To draw on one other modality: physicist David Bohm describes this higher-dimensional space as the implicate; more on that in a moment.

Do you ever meet the rivers of your place in other forms in your dreams?

All of this is necessary background to arrive at the topic at hand: what is a dam?

To return once again to the imagery of Miyazaki - Kawa no Kami arrives at the bathhouse smothered by the toxic sludge that builds up behind dams. Chihiro, working in the implicate, is able to remove the dam, clearing the sludge, revealing Kawa no Kami as the magnificent river god that they are. May we all have the fortitude, grace, and subtlety of Chihiro…

In his book, "Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World," (Patagonia Books, 2023), Steven Hawley enumerates the multitude of reasons why dams don't make sense:
- Per kilowatt hour of energy production, hydropower can be up to three times worse in regard to emissions as natural gas. This is due to the increased methane emissions of damed area as a result of anaerobic digestion of organic material. Globally, hydropower emits as much CO2e in methane as Germany's total emissions (the world's ninth largest emitter).
- The average sizable dam in the United States is 57 years old, while the designed serviceable lifetime of these dams range from 50 to 100 years.
- To make matters worse, these "designed serviceable lifetimes" have since been downgraded, due to additional risk information now available about cement aging, seismic risk, downstream development, etc.
- Just in the United States, it would take more than $1 trillion to bring repair these dams to a state of adequate safety.
- Statistically speaking, the United States is due for a rash of catastrophic dam failures. Historically, there have been catastrophic dam failures in other countries: in 1975, the Banqiao Dam Failure in China may have killed as many as 240,000 people. In 1979, the Machchhu-2 Dam Failure in India may have killed as many as 25,000 people.
- Climate change increases the frequency of both extreme drought and extreme flood. Many reservoirs are so empty as to be pointless, and many dams will see flood levels beyond their engineered specification, risking failure.
- The dams of the world hold back enough sediment to cover the state of California fifteen feet deep. The cessation of sediment metabolism caused by dams reduces intertidal environmental habitat and increases costal erosion rates.
- Costal areas are reliant for sediments currently held behind dams to slow erosion of costal beaches.
- On average, most dams are a net financial loss. Most large dams only exist due to massive federal subsidies (many of which have come as a result of corporate extortion).
- Rivers are a primary habitat for aquatic life, and dams destroy this habitat. Think of life in a dammed river like life in Syria: endless razor wire and checkpoints; no space for connectivity, and the monotony of daily life interspersed with seemingly-random killings. According to the WWF, global fish populations declined by 84% between 1970 and 2016, and dams have been a significant contributor to this decline.

All of these things may be true, but unfortunately their weight has not yet burst the cultural dam preventing dam removal on a mass scale. This is where hyperbeings come in.

The concept of rivers as hyperbeings begins to put us in touch with the magnificence and power that rivers possess. Sometimes I hear people say things like, "deer are so stupid; they just freeze in front of moving cars and die." This is a terrible test of a deer's intelligence. Humans are dyeing at catastrophic rates from things like opioid overdose; but this is a poor way to judge the value of our species. Sometimes people will critique animists with accusations of "anthropomorphism;" generally these accusations belie the low regard in which the accuser holds all that isn't human. But what if deer are intelligent? What if rivers are alive? These ontological shifts require an equivalent shift in our ethics and understanding of telos.

If rivers are hyperbeings, then humans are part of the microbiome-or simply, biome-of these organisms. At the moment, we're behaving more like parasites than symbionts. If the our host, the rivers, die of our callous disregard, can we remain?
In Robert Bringhurst's 2023 epic poem, "The Ridge," he speaks about the ways in which forests have an integrity to them that is sometimes overlooked:

"After three hundred years, neither the eastern
nor western white pines planted in Europe
have reached out to the sky like the vanished trees
of Maine and Montana. Trees, like ideas,
you can plant and transplant, but forests
are minds. They are civilizations.
No one has ever transplanted a mind.
And no one, whatever they claim, has ever
transplanted a civilization."
(pages 116–117)

Even within a given place, forests can die. Log a place enough times and the orchids will leave to be replaced by poison ivy, even if some trees come back.

Thankfully, the integrity of rivers is self-evident. No one is going around with bottles of river water claiming they've transplanted a river. Rivers, in a fundamental way, are non-displaceable. And yet, like us all, they are mortal-susceptible to being flooded or drained (often times in concert as a form of public water supply).

I think there is something here though about a forest, or a river, being a mind, a civilization, a society. To cite the language of Austin Wade Smith, if we "undual" the human/nature divide, maybe civilizations have always been a holobiont-and amalgam of forest culture, river culture, rock culture, insect culture, lichen culture, human culture. In better understanding the river hyperbeings of our place, we might better understand ourselves. In centering the aliveness of these river hyperbeings, we rejuvenate the heart (or cardiovascular system) of our more-than-human civilizations.… (altro)

Cracked by Steven Hawley is an important look at the damage done by the over-utilization of dams, to both the environment and many people's lives.

Hawley provides a history of both the building and the damage done, offering insight into not simply what happened but why. Ranging from some policymakers believing they were doing good to those who simply saw another way to make money at the expense of, well, anyone and anything else.

While I would have preferred some endnotes or footnotes, Hawley largely mentions in the text where a lot of his information came from. This is not an academic book, it is written by a journalist, and not many newspapers (real or virtual) or magazines have them. The bibliography is excellent. You can ignore someone who is so enamored of their Kindle because they can see what percentage of a book is "documentation." They don't understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative. But they also recently caught the word corporatism and now they seem to misuse it everywhere they can. Simple minds, what can I say.

I'd recommend this to those who don't think that saving the environment, you know, the world that supports our existence, is a partisan issue. And since we live in a democracy (sorta) then when things are harmful it is our responsibility to be active in changing them, so yeah, use this to motivate your activism. Activism is not a bad thing except to those who mistakenly believe themselves to be entitled to their unearned position.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (altro)