Holding Back the River: Water and Colonialism in Northwestern Ontario

Dams are an ancient technology: the earliest known earthen works to manipulate river flows along the Nile date back to 4,900 years ago. The era of ever-larger and abundant dams has been relatively brief, however, inaugurated (arguably) by the construction of the massive Hoover Dam (221.3 metres high) on the Colorado River in 1935 and accelerating rapidly with advances in engineering and construction equipment after Second World War. Mega dams, such as China’s Three Gorges and Egypt’s High Aswan dam, stand out in the public and political imagination as symbols of national ambition and as temples to the high modernist faith in the ability of science and technology to bend wild nature to human purposes. Perhaps even more impressive than these awe-inspiring mega projects (or more disturbing, from an environmentalist perspective) is the sheer number of large dams that have been constructed globally. One recent study has estimated that 2.8 million active dams have reduced the proportion of free-flowing rivers (longer than 1,000 kilometres) around the globe to a mere 37 percent of the total. Another has posited that the world’s 58,000 large dams — defined as higher than 15 metres — possess a cumulative storage capacity equal to one-sixth the total annual flow of the Earth’s rivers to the sea. Humans have thus transformed an astonishingly large proportion of the world’s natural flowing watercourses into enviro-technical systems meant to serve their needs and desires. The proliferation of dams has undoubtedly provided an eclectic array of human benefits, including electrical power, flood control, improved navigation, and water storage capacity to serve irrigation and water diversion schemes. Even author and activist Marc Reisner, an ardent critic of dams, acknowledged that much of southern California would have to be evacuated if it could no longer borrow water from the dams and diversions of the Colorado River to combat the inherent aridity of the region (and even without the removal of the dams, the fact the river’s reservoirs are now drying up due to overuse and persistent drought associated with climate change presents a severe challenge to the region). As one of the “brute force technologies” historian Paul Josephson identified with the industrialization of the natural world, the environmental impacts associated with dams have been (and continue to be) many and varied. They include the flooding of vast areas to create reservoirs, methylmercury contamination in reservoirs due to the decay of terrestrial vegetation, blockage of fish spawning routes, the destruction of shoreline habitat due to newly fluctuating water levels on lakes and rivers, and downstream impacts such as the drying of wetlands and shrinkage of deltas. Early works of environmental history in the United States, particularly those studying irrigation schemes in the arid west, have tended to associate dam development with the arrogant appropriation of water systems to support capitalist greed or state developments schemes. Richard White’s landmark work, The Organic Machine, provided some nuance, with its move away from a purely declensionist historical narrative and its emphasis on the hybrid nature of the heavily dammed Columbia River as a product of both nature and culture, an environment that was constantly in flux, “mocking our supposed control.” Even so, it is difficult to completely ignore the will to dominate nature that is often successfully embodied in dam construction schemes. Mark Fiege’s foundational work on irrigation schemes in Idaho, for example, echoes White’s arguments about complex hybrid environments, but he still acknowledges that, “more than any other feature in the irrigated landscape, dams — massive, angular, towering structures — signified man’s ability to exert his will over wildness.” Despite the green veneer that …