Hawley, S. 2023. Cracked: The future of dams in a hot, chaotic world. Patagonia, ISBN-10: 1938340779, 320 p., $17.80.
(URL: https://www.patagonia.com/shop/books/patagonia-published)
Sarah H. Kelly
Dartmouth College, Sarah.H.Kelly@dartmouth.edu
To cite this review: Kelly, S.H. 2024. Review of “Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World”, Patagonia, 2023, by Steven Hawley, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/371-crack
For anyone interested in dam removal, hydropower, and rivers, Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World, is worthy of a close read. Those with a concern for how dams have affected Indigenous sovereignty, economics, and biodiversity in the American West will find this book of particular interest. Of note is the author’s decision to center Indigenous histories with dams. I also appreciated its in-depth conversations about what dam decommissioning entails, like coalition histories and the science of native fish spawning in restored watersheds. The vivid page-wide photographs peppered throughout the book – each citing the native lands they depict – also distinguish the text. Environmental journalist and filmmaker Stephen Hawley’s book offers a critical lens onto current conversations about renewable energy, water management, and climate fluctuations – one that I plan to assign to my students and recommend to colleagues.
The manuscript’s central focus is on stories. Each story, in its own way, explains what those of us who study dams already know. Their costs can often outweigh their benefits, and the effects have historically included multiple forms of violence. Cracked tells the stories of Indigenous peoples who hold intimate relationships with rivers; some of whose relationships are currently being revitalized by dam removal. Historically, dams were a mechanism for dispossession, producing irrevocable damage and violating treaties with native and indigenous peoples. Additionally, dams frequently benefited settler farmers and businesses, while the economic costs were under-estimated. Through in-depth interviews with key actors across sectors, Hawley demonstrates that dams don’t make much as much economic, ecological, or climate sense as was once thought that they did.
Each chapter illustrates the evolving problems that dams pose with climate change. The quirky “Dam Removal 101”, Chapter 7, was my favorite. Part playbook, part community organizing guide, it invites the reader to join the dam decommissioning movement. This is a great resource – one that I will consult again.
At the beginning, Chapter 1: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Dams” critiques the dam building complex in the American West. Public investments into large dams, and restructuring of property rights systems for land and water, has arguably not benefited the public collective good to the extent that it’s been celebrated. In many cases, the result has been the dispossession of native peoples of their waters and land. This precipitated the re-engineering of a water management system in the arid west that does not fare well with hotter and dryer climate trends. Cracked explains the history of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. Hawley presents that “hydropower is a colonialist power”, when referring to flooding of fertile ancestral land and severing their vital spiritual relationships with salmon, trout, and other fish. There is also the chilling tale of the US government knowingly and deliberately releasing Iodine-131 in a vast area of land in the Pacific Northwest via a plant powered by the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River.
Chapter 2, “What’s Missing Here: The Snake River Dams” begins with Palouse tribal elder Carrie Chapman Nightwalker Schuster. Explaining the violence inherent to how the dams were built, she retells how during dam prospecting, the bodies of their tribe were exhumed from within the canoes they were buried by an archaeologist without consent. Today, the Snake River is undergoing dam decommissioning; Hawley tells the story of how the coalition operates. Stories of Indigenous resurgence signal other ways forward. Like the Nimiipuu tribe recovering the ancestral practice of canoe making and using solar power to help transition away from hydroelectric power from the dams as they are decommissioned.
Evaporation, as Hawley reminds us, is the second largest water consumer on the Colorado River (in Chapter 3, p. 98). Reservoir Mead “points to the urgent need for a new way of thinking about water distribution in the basin” (pp. 97-98). Major environmental issues with dams that are discussed include their rapid evaporation, alterations to sediment transport, and methane they emit over time. In Chapter 4, Dam Safety is explored, from dam-related disasters in Italy to the growing risk that dams will start to generate cracks more frequently in the future.
Chapter 5 contextualizes the current decommissioning of the Klamath Dam. For Klamath tribes, the business of damming their lands involved widescale clearcutting of forests, loss of hunting and gathering areas, and loss of ancestral lands and waters. I appreciated that the author discusses the specifics of how fish recovery science and debates play out in dam decommissioning. Chapter 6, “The Return of the Elwha,” reframes the benefits and impending possibility of rivers running free.
Chapter 8 on the Patagona Sin Represas (Patagonia Without Dams) movement, told a partial history of dams in Chile. My long-term research has been with Mapuche-Williche communities in southern Chile on hydropower conflicts and water protection. Mapuche territory has, for the last number of decades, experienced hydropower as a colonialist power, as Hawley puts it. Yet, that history is not included in his focus on the charismatic actors of this international movement. There are always many stories to tell about rivers and dams, but this seems an oversight given the book’s intention.
The final chapters of the book return to a hopeful possibility in the biological diversity of free rivers, and the notion that we may continue to rejuvenate dammed watersheds, from the Blue Heart of Europe to the Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon dams in the American West.
Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic Word, invites us to reconsider the worth of dams, and their practicality at this current moment. It reminds us that dams on Indigenous lands are intricately connected to colonialism; and that rivers are most vital when they are free.
