Narcissus Harvest in Turkey
Last fall, I started reading Arundhati Roy’s ‘Algebra of Infinite Justice’. In her second essay ‘The Greater Common Good’ she wrote an extensive essay on the environmental and social costs of the much-contested Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat, India.
Jawaharlal Nehru conceived the plan of building a vast gravity dam across the Narmada River in 1961, the dam took decades to complete and was inaugurated in 2018 by Modi (initially with the funding of the World Bank). The dam was met with much opposition from environmental activists and those advocating on behalf of populations living in the Narmada Valley who were being displaced. Roy’s essay was an addition to the much extensive literature and dissent that was being produced at the time to highlight the damage of massive dam projects on riverine ecosystems.
Within the context of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, many aspects come into play that aren’t exceptional but worth mentioning. Upon construction, what’s immediately recognizable is the state’s attitude of contempt towards vulnerable and poor communities living along the Narmada, mainly Adivasis and Dalits (lower-caste peoples). The governments of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh were complicit in the inadequate and destructive resettlement of over 200 villages into rehabilitation centers that further destabilized the livelihoods of these communities (this is data from the 90s). These were communities who had lived alongside the Narmada for centuries, who had ancient relationships with the Earth that mothered this river. It is a river that’s often referred to as the '“Life Line of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh,” with its flow emptying into the Arabian Sea. The dam’s establishment resulted in the upheaval of mass populations, the destruction of crops, the cutting down of forests, negative effects on downstream fishing, threats on wildlife natural habitat, waterlogging and salinization of water, silting of the river bed, deforestation, and the increase in disease transmission amongst the resettled populations such as malaria as the construction of the dam had serious impacts on the environment and quality of water.
Was all of this destruction worth securing drinking water, irrigation, and hydropower for a few million people? What Roy underlines is the utter uselessness of many of these mega national projects, with over 200,000 people being hauled from their ancestral homes — the purpose of the dam was riddled with corruption, developmental politics, and heightened nationalism.
These ultra-capitalist projects never make sense.
We all know that mega-dams are bad for the environment. However, many developing nations still pursue this genre of market growth via Western mechanisms of economic development like hydropower and irrigation. It’s important to note that while the World Bank funded the Sardar Sarovar Dam, they eventually withdrew funding when the Indian government refused to comply with environmental rulings. The World Bank, a clearly West-centric institution renowned for paralyzing developing economies, had transported its toxic idea of developmental technology to the Global South— then pulled out. You don’t see European countries building mega-dams and destroying their eco-systems. This isn’t an isolated event; it’s a singular point in a much extensive timeline of targetted environmental destruction.
This also highlights the hypocritical policy patterns of many Western climate advocacy states (ex. the Scandinavian nations) who actively contribute to climate change in states in the South, then lead conversations on mitigating the climate crisis at global forums. Climate change will hit poor countries the hardest, with Africa being the most vulnerable continent. Yet still, when environmental issues are brought to the forefront of global conversations, those who are most impacted rarely have a seat at the table. Western nations prop up climate treaties like the Paris Agreement and Kyoto Protocol for every nation to abide by, without considering how unfair and imperialist these mandates actually are. Developed countries want developing nations to apply a homogenous standard of climate protection when they not only caused a majority of the environmental damage we see today but are also equipped with advanced technology to shield themselves from the worst that is yet to come. There is zero accountability in environmental politics. Most of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the US and other EU countries, the US emits more greenhouse gases than India, a nation of 1.3 billion. While Western countries are building windmill-powered plants, flood barriers, and floatable homes, developing countries are pursuing destructive projects like gravity dams because of the underlying pressure to survive, provide a basic standard of living, and catch up to the globalized capitalist economy.
When we think of North-South global relations, it’s important to understand how countries that are capable of pandering to Western standards of economic development seek to acquire status. The easiest way to prove yourself in front of those who view you as inferior is to learn how to play their game, the game of capitalism. Countries like India, Brazil, and Ethiopia are a few of many middle-large-sized nations that partake in building mass dams to propel economic growth. In our world of robust capitalism, matters of developmental projects are perceived as existential issues of survival; it becomes a matter of life or death. When Indian politicians were convincing residents of the Narmada Valley to leave their homes, they constantly spewed out this narrative that they were sacrificing some comfort for the greater good of the “nation.”
This same rhetoric of collective sacrifice and nationalism is what fueled the construction and now facilitation of Ethiopia’s GERD along the Blue Nile. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is probably one of the most emotive development projects to exist. After decades of constant rejection from the IMF and World Bank, Ethiopia’s government began project-building in 2011 amid the Arab Spring. Civilian bond payments funded the majority of the dam; I vividly remember my own parents sending bond payments to the Ethiopian government’s GERD campaigns. This did solidify the people’s emotional connection to the gravity dam which is also expected to provide electricity to over 65 million Ethiopians and help the country achieve its goal of graduating into the middle-income country class by 2025. When Simegnew Bekele, the engineer and mastermind behind the GERD’s infrastructure, mysteriously died in 2018, the country went into national mourning. It is not often that a country regards an engineer as a national hero, but that is the nature of a developmental state.
In an interview with NYT shortly before his death, Bekele had stated that the GERD would "eradicate our common enemy — poverty.”
The dam has the ability to restructure power relations in the Nile Basin region, irritating the current hydro-hegemon, Egypt. The core problem with nationalist sentiments motivating projects as large as the GERD is that it doesn’t leave space for any substantive dialogue regarding the climate impacts of the project or the human costs for upstream states. The other issue is that when governments actively construct narratives of victimization and developmentalism, the important factors get drowned out. In 2001, Ethiopia adopted a national policy of eradicating poverty which it saw as a perpetual threat; 2001 marked the country’s embarkment on a relentless journey of capitalist aspirations. Addis Ababa in the ’80s and early 2010s are virtually entirely different universes. Today, Ethiopia is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The previous EPRDF regime did use the trope of development to maintain and consolidate power, but its relevancy was appealing to the masses. Because, in fact, yes, we were poor, and framing poverty as our ultimate adversary was quite digestible. When reminiscing on the atrocities of the EPRDF’s infamous 20-something year regime, many Ethiopians point out the rapid development as the only “good thing” to come out of the era. Development seems to be at the core of Ethiopian identity.
On the same note, our hunger for economic status-seeking erases the strife that Egyptians may face as the GERD could possibly slow down upstream water flow. In his chapter ‘Nationalism in India’, Rabindranath Tagore says, “During the evolution of the Nation the moral culture of brotherhood was limited by geographical boundaries because at that time those boundaries were true. Now they have become imaginary lines of tradition divested of the qualities of real obstacles. So the time has come when man’s moral nature must deal with this great fact with all seriousness or perish”. Beyond the shadows of nationalism, can we ever extend sympathy to Egyptian communities, often farmers and working-class people, who live along the coast of the Nile? Though scientists and hydrologists confirm that the Nile is moreso threatened by climate change and increasing population rates instead of the dam, Egyptians living in the Nile Valley and Delta are suffering from reduced water stress and reduced crop yields. Some studies predict that by 2085, Egypt will become completely water insecure. The Nile provides Egypt with over 90% of its water sources. Access to water is a human right, and as the climate crisis expands globally, we must reckon with reality. Climate change knows no borders, and we cannot blindly continue to jeopardize the survival of one society because of our own capitalist fantasies. My question is, despite mega projects like the GERD being incredibly unethical in theory, how can this project move forward equitably? How can we prevent any further ecological disasters? How can we advocate for peacebuilding and reaching consensus when so much is at stake?
I recently read an old essay (from For Love Of Country) by Elaine Scarry on cosmopolitanism and how we imagine “others.” She argued that to substitute nationalism with internationalism, we needed to consistently practice “generous imaginings” of outer groups, such as conceptualizing all foreign peoples as part of a larger interconnected brotherhood. Building on mutual assistance, Scarry suggests that countries need to institutionalize methods of re-imagining “others”. Through imaginative recovery, I hope that we can move away from the discourse of perpetual rivalry and begin moving towards prioritizing solidarity for the protection of our ever-deteriorating Earth.
Alluding to what we know as the Ozone layer of the atmosphere, Allah الله says in the Quran: ‘and We made the sky a well-secured canopy- yet from its wonders they turn away’ (21:32) and ‘It is Allah who made for you the earth a place of settlement and the sky a structure [i.e., ceiling] and formed you and perfected your forms and provided you with good things. That is Allah, your Lord; then blessed is Allah, Lord of the worlds.’ (40:64)
I’ve been reading:
Black and Dalit Solidarity Movements, the connection between Ambedkar and Du Bois, and how both communities have taken inspiration from each other
A Georgetown report on the relations between gender, conflict, and climate crises
Big Tech’s Guide to Talking about AI Ethics, this list of tech vocabulary taught me a lot
Really cool interactive photo gallery of Mughal Art centering Shah Jahan, I’d recommend if you want to consume something that’ll refresh your brain from Zoom fatigue
The Renaissance of Water, the foreign policy of water-relations, and the connections between Hydroelectric Renaissance in Ethiopia and Renaissance Italy
‘Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms.’ Basically, we might witness nation-states turn into city-states one day
The EU is set to ban AI tech used for surveillance
This guide to abolition from Teen Vogue
10 Things We Learned About Earth Day Since the last Earth Day