Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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imagine an access road, and the bustle of a large human workforce in this remote location . . . and fail.
Patagonia is desolate. Its very emptiness is part of its charm and it has always drawn those escaping society. Butch Cassidy and his gang sought refuge in these wastelands, as did a variety of Soviet defectors, Welsh Christians and English fortune-seekers. It’s a rainless, inhospitable place, incessantly windy and freezing cold. But the skies are vast, the austral light is incredible and the rocky desert is a palette of extraordinary colours.
Above me soar enormous black condors seeking death in the dusty grasses. In the absence of trees, other birds of prey sit on the road, leaving it until the last moment before taking off in front of my wheels. I see guanacos (a type of llama) and a black and white skunk as I drive for hour upon hour. The desert rolls on in valleys created by glaciers, and the expanse is strewn with large incongruous boulders, called ‘erratics’ because they don’t belong to this rocky ground. They were dragged down from the mountains and dumped here by ancient glaciers.
After almost a day of driving through the vast bleakness, I am relieved to see a sign of human habitation. Poplar trees struggle to protect a lone house, standing small-windowed against the chill. It is one of the region’s estancias – ranches set up by those who pioneered these lands nearly a century ago, clearing the rocks and natives to profit from a booming wool industry. Further on, I come across a bubbling carpet of sheep, herded by gauchos on horseback and their dogs. The scene looks timeless and utterly natural, and yet it’s an illusion – sheep were only introduced to the country in the late nineteenth century.
Eventually, I reach Coyhaique, capital of the Aysén region of Patagonia. In rolling hills at the foot of a basalt massif, it is a compact, ordered town whose folk live mainly by fishing and cattle ranching. For many, life is not dramatically different from that experienced by the pioneers; but graffiti around town reveals a new disquiet. ‘Patagonia Sin Represas!’ (‘Patagonia Without Dams!’) is perhaps the politest of the slogans, reflecting anger over plans for the Baker River, and for several further dams on the untamed Cuervo and Pascua rivers.
Like most hydropower, the energy would be produced by building up a head of stored water behind a dam that can be released in powerful bursts past turbines to generate electricity. To convert the relatively shallow river flows of the Baker and Pascua into deep energy stores means creating reservoirs, and together the dams would flood 6,000 hectares of land. But the biggest opposition is reserved for the accompanying electrical transmission line. Some 6,000 pylons, towering as much as eighty-five metres high, will transport the direct current 2,450 kilometres north to Santiago, Chile’s capital, and on to the energy-hungry mines in the desert beyond. The electricity line alone will require one of the world’s biggest clear-cuttings, a 120-metre-wide corridor through ancient forests, fragmenting the ecosystems en route.
Critics say the dams, pylons and transmission line would destroy forever a true wilderness for short-term energy gains; proponents argue that hydroelectricity is a clean source of energy, that Chile needs the 3,500 megawatts per year of power to meet its development goals of becoming South America’s first developed nation by 2018 and, lacking oil or coal reserves, has no viable alternative.
The country needs to triple its installed capacity by 2025 to meet its energy requirements – currently half the nation’s electricity comes from hydropower and the other half from imported fossil fuels. The Patagonian dams alone could generate one-third of Chile’s electricity, which surely makes the sacrifice of a few remote rivers a small price to pay for such bountiful energy? However, those opposing the dams argue that Chile has one of the longest coastlines in the world, 7,000 kilometres, which is ideal for wind, wave or tidal energy projects; 10% of the world’s volcanoes, so plenty of geothermal potential; one of the world’s strongest solar-energy zones in the Atacama Desert, all of which could provide energy more locally to its point of use without disturbing pristine Patagonia. Confused, I consult an energy expert.
Claudio Zaror, a chemical engineer and energy advisor to the government, is a quietly spoken, slight man who endured the worst of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. Kidnapped by the secret police in his twenties, tortured and held for years in a cell sixty centimetres square, he was a lucky ‘disappeared’ – he survived. After decades of deprivation, he wants the lives of ordinary Chileans to improve and has little patience for what he considers unnecessary sentimentality over some remote rivers. For Claudio, the issue is clear-cut: ‘We are a developing nation with nearly 20% of the population living in extreme poverty – I want that number to reduce and we need energy for that.’
Every year the country needs an extra 500 megawatt installed capacity – another 8% annually – because of an increase in population, consumption and industrial growth, Claudio says. ‘If it doesn’t come from the Patagonian dams, it will have to come from a fossil-fuel source with all the carbon emissions that entails, because other renewable energy sources are prohibitively expensive. Environmentally and economically, hydropower is our only feasible option,’ he says.
Climate change is bringing new urgency to the situation, Claudio adds, because droughts are becoming more frequent and severe across the central region, where most of the nation’s hydropower comes from. ‘During the 2008–9 drought, less than 15% of the base-load was met by hydro and we had to import diesel for the power plants at $118 per barrel.’ Meanwhile, with 92% of the country’s glaciers retreating owing to climate change, the glacier melt means there would be strong river flow in Patagonia for the short to medium term.
However, the dams issue remains divisive, not just in Aysén, but across the nation. Surveys show more than half the population is against the proposed dams, but the gap is small enough to cause the government problems whichever decision it takes. The controversy has spilled internationally, as people from around the world claim a stake in this globally unique wilderness. Even the venerable New York Times has waded in with an editorial calling for the dam proposals to be scrapped.
Over the last century, humans have built the equivalent of a dam a day – the vast majority since 1950. Two-thirds of the world’s major rivers have now been disrupted with more than 50,000 large dams – there are more than 85,000 dams in the US alone, stoppering large and small rivers and in most cases utterly transforming natural flow. The most famous of these, the Hoover Dam, constructed in the 1930s, is largely responsible for killing the mighty Colorado River before it reaches the ocean. With a 40% increase in global hydropower predicted by 2050, humanity in the Anthropocene has designs on most major rivers, and controversy over how to use these planetary arteries is only set to increase. In Europe and North America, most of the hydropower potential has now been exploited – indeed some dams are being removed and rivers ‘renaturalised’. In Africa, Asia and South America, though, hundreds of hydrodams are being planned to provide essential electricity for some of the world’s poorest people, and in some of the most ecologically important environments from Patagonia to the Amazon to the Congo. However, the people receiving the new electricity are usually not the same people faced with losing their environment, livelihoods and homes.
Globally, hydropower is an attractive low-carbon source of energy, which unlike solar or wind can produce a continual supply of electricity no matter the weather. Around 20% of electricity worldwide already comes from hydropower. The infrastructure can be relatively inexpensive, is 80–90% efficient and comes with its own battery: the reservoir. This is such a good device that solar- and wind-power generators are increasingly looking to use ‘pumped hydro’ to store their surplus electricity, using it to pump water high up to a reservoir for release when the sun doesn’t shine or there’s no wind. Dammed reservoirs are, of course, also a great way of storing water for drought and modulating damaging floods.
Yet dams, for all their attractive benefits, are also saddled with a lot of negative impacts. Creating the reservoir often involves flooding fertile land, sometimes displacing thousands of people. Communities may lose their land, houses and culturally important sites such as ancestral burial grounds or a landscape that carries strong meaning for them. If the area to be flooded is not adequately cleared of vegetation, methane – a greenhouse gas with twenty-five times the warming potential (over a century) of carbon dioxide – will be released from rotting material. Nearly a quarter of humanity’s methane emissions come from big dams.