One of the issues that the ecology movement is battling in a number of different parts of the globe is that of huge dam systems - like those of the Narmada or the Ilisu, which we deal with in more detail below. To some extent this development represents a partial success for green campaigners, as hydroelectric power is often posed as a cleaner alternative to nuclear power. Indeed the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has led to orders to reduce electricity consumption altogether in some parts of the world - for example in the US President Clinton has called for the federal government to reduce its energy use by 35 percent by 2010.
In June in Washington the National Hydropower Association criticised Clinton for leaving hydropower out of an executive order designed to reduce government greenhouse gas emissions by requiring more use of renewable power.
"Not only is hydropower undisputedly a renewable energy source by any standard definition, it is our nation's oldest and most significant renewable energy source (that) is essentially infinite," the trade group said in a letter to Clinton.
The request comes as the administration is under pressure on the question of existing dams -some of which have already been Part of the massive Narmada dam project removed and others of which campaigners are arguing should be because of their profoundly negative effects on fragile eco-sys. tems. But the questions posed by dams, particularly the huge systems consisting of many individual dams over an extended length of one or more major rivers pose far broader questions than many in advanced capitalist countries often think of as environmental questions.
Particularly on the left there is a conservative tendency to think of human beings as the species affected by social questions, and ecology as the study of what happens to other animals and plants.
The politics of dams shows that such a separation can't be meaningfully made. The construction of huge dams has already caused the displacement of millions of people and the destruction of their homes and livelihoods. This has often affected communities of ethnic groups who are discriminated against, often the first peoples of the planet.
Not only are Kurdish people threatened by the Ilisu, not only have millions of tribal peoples been dispossessed in India, but in Labrador, Canada the Inuit people are fighting a plan to expand the Churchill Falls system which sells electricity cheaplyto the north-eastern United States.
Already a lot of their land has been lost by earlier system built in the 1970s for which they never received the compensation promised. Now they have managed to halt the new process until meaningful consultation takes place. In Vietnam 103,000 people including ethnic minorities will be relocated to build a reservoir for a giant hydro-electric power plant in Son La province, remote area• in mountainous northwestern Vietnam. "Building the Son La power plant is a 1,000-year dream of the ethnic minorities there," Nhan Dan, mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, claimed in a lengthy article:
Some of these projects also pose questions of control of water supplies over vast areas with political ramifications beyond the state boundaries.
Water from the Tigris and the Euphrates is key to the economies of countries of the Middle East far beyond Turkey. The prospect of wars for water is not an idle speculation the prospect of serious drought increases.
Many of these projects are aimed at expanding into new markets where current electricity consumption is very low. In Nepal for example, less than 15 percent of the kingdom's 22 million people, among the poorest in the world, have access to electricity.
U.S. energy giant Enron International has applied for a license to study the possibility of building a hydroelectric dam on Nepal's Karnali river, which could export electricity to neighbouring India and China.
One of the successes of campaigning on this issue has been that many multilateral bodies including the World Bank have become very suspicious of such projects and refused to fund them favouring instead small hydroelectric projects that minimise the impact on local people and the environment.
This means that loan guarantees for these schemes usually come from governments in Western Europe and the US.
This puts an important responsibility on activists here to ensure that our governments are not funding schemes that will devastate the lives of so many people.