With the possible exceptions of enterprises involving nuclear-fission or the incineration of hazardous wastes, no more socioculturally incendiary undertaking can be announced than the intention to construct a dam and reservoir project across a free-flowing stream. The ethical outrage heaped on sponsors of new projects is rivaled by the same antagonists' dyspepsia over sad outcomes at past reservoirs, whose dams' eventual removals with repairs of former conditions have been demanded by friends of the environment.
Explored here are current and past professional standards involving choices between right and wrong (i.e., ethics) that have been breached among politicians, economists, engineers, or other scientists during the design or emplacement of a (large) dam. While it sets no records in any particular category of dam features, the Aswan High Dam astride the Nile in southern Egypt will be the touchstone of the analysis. The following fundamental issues will be addressed: 1) What detriments beyond financial costs do dams cause for unsuspecting beneficiaries and the unintended other-affected? 2) What benefits do dam projects provide to humanity, to the land, and to environmental flora and fauna? and 3) What alternatives to avoid environmental damages from dams exist or may be anticipated?
Social and Environmental Problems with Riverine Impoundments
No less a conservationist than Theodore Roosevelt is reputed to have said that "a river is, from its headwaters to its mouth, a single unit and should be developed with this concept in mind" (Ciriacy-Wantrup 28-22). Some, including several federal agencies, once took this to mean that America's rivers should be dammed from one end to the other, more or less along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority model. Still, no less ethically-challenged an American president than Richard Nixon signed the only Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (of 1968) that the United States has ever had, m...