The Hydropolitics of Dams: Engineering or Ecosystems?
Author(s): Mark Everard (Author)
Publisher: Zed Books
Publication Date: 8 Aug. 2013
Language: English
Print length: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 178032541X
ISBN-13: 9781780325415
Book Description
The Hydropolitics of Dams charts the troubled waters of ‘heavy engineering’ approaches to ecosystem management, exploring the history, benefits and problems of large dams. It then explores diverse ecosystem-based approaches to management of human interactions with the water cycle, concluding that a synthesis of approaches is needed in future. The book also addresses political, economic and legal dimensions of water management. Featuring case studies from China, India and South Africa, this insightful new book argues that there are more appropriate physical and social technologies that can help to sustainably provide access to clean water for all.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The Hydropolitics of Dams tackles the conflicts we face in managing our increasingly pressurized water resources both globally and locally. It highlights the need for a way forward centred on knowledge and people, using the best of both engineering and ecosystem-based solutions to develop a more sustainable relationship with the water cycle. Rich in examples from all continents, this book inspires new thinking and explores the practical delivery of sustainable water management. –Arlin Rickard, chief executive, The Rivers Trust
This book comes at the right moment. Energy-strapped countries with unpopular governments are seeking to revive the building of large dams (after a slight pause following the report of the World Commission on Dams). Economic recession and crumbling political credibility have revived dams as development tools; but they are an aggravation rather than solution to existing crises. The world’s rivers are too valuable ecologically to block them off, drowning communities in the process. What eco-campaigners need is an updated, scientific, value-centred rationale for the defence of river systems. Mark Everard does a well-reasoned job of it, replete with case studies. His vision of deliberative democracy to resolve water dilemmas is the way forward. –Graeme Addison, founding member, Southern Africa Rivers Association, and science writer
About the Author
Dr Mark Everard’s work in all four sectors of society – private, public, academic and voluntary – has taken him across five continents to undertake applied research, policy development and capacity-building relating to the ways in which people connect with ecosystems. The author of twelve other books, including Common Ground (Zed Books, 2011), over sixty peer-reviewed scientific papers and over two hundred technical magazine articles, Mark is also a communicator on sustainability and wider aquatic matters on TV and radio. He has served on numerous government advisory and expert groups in the UK, as well as advising other governments and multinational corporations on sustainability matters. His specialty is on the water environment, land uses across the catchments that influence it, the pressures that people impose upon it and the many often unrecognised benefits that they derive from it. Mark’s work includes environmental ethics and economics as a means to bring our intimate interdependencies with ecosystems into the mainstream of public awareness and government thinking.
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