Why Is the Three Gorges Dam Said to Be the Culprit Behind the Drought?

(Note: the image comes from Jandan’s Boring Pictures/original link, for amusement only~)

The recent drought has once again made the much-controversial Three Gorges Dam the target of everyone’s criticism: some say the Three Gorges is the culprit behind the drought, earthquakes, and even all sorts of anomalies, while the pundits say that without the Three Gorges the drought would be even worse. So which is it?

Obviously, the most “scientific” answer is: we don’t know! This is not like a hypothesis in physics, where we can design an experiment with controlled variables—holding all the other variables constant and looking separately at how things develop with and without the Three Gorges. There is only one Three Gorges in the world, and only one dam-building in history; we cannot set up a control group somewhere else, and the existing empirical data from other dams cannot simply be copied over to the Three Gorges.

Of course, we can cite ongoing climate records and see what trends appear in the meteorological data before and after the Three Gorges was built. Indeed, within a limited range of a few hundred kilometers, weather records show that the Three Gorges did bring about greater-than-expected climate changes, mainly in precipitation. But what about on a larger scale? That is completely hard to say. It is not that there have been no climate changes before and after the Three Gorges; in these past few years, the global climate has unquestionably seen all sorts of anomalies. The question is: to whom should these anomalies be attributed? The Three Gorges Dam, or the coal mines of Inner Mongolia, or the farting of dairy cows? … This is not to say that some local project cannot have a global climate impact; in fact, every part of a system affects the operation of the whole system. Precisely for that reason, it becomes utterly difficult to disentangle which part caused what kind of effect.

Some ordinary people or environmentalists regard the Three Gorges as the culprit. That is of course arbitrary, but not entirely unreasonable, because ordinary people do not “represent” science in the first place. The problem lies with certain “experts” who speak in the name of science and can so easily pronounce conclusions such as “without the Three Gorges it would be drier,” which is simply unreasonable. I have also seen people earnestly using science to argue for the harmlessness of the Three Gorges. For example, some time ago on Weiming I saw a post explaining how meteorological models work and then saying that the water surface of the whole Three Gorges area is actually very small, so small that it does not even reach the smallest grid cell the model can resolve—how could it possibly have a global impact? That article also solemnly popularized the “butterfly effect,” explaining that the butterfly effect cannot be used to accuse the Three Gorges—of course that is true. But the reason a tiny grid cell may still influence the whole is not necessarily the butterfly effect. The key is that our “space” is in fact not homogeneous; even in mathematically formal language, the weights of different positions in the model are not necessarily the same. Take the Yangtze River: if you drop a bomb at its mouth, the entire basin will not change much; but the same bomb, with the same destructive range, if dropped near the source, is very likely to affect the whole basin. Stick a needle into a person, and the size of the needle relative to the human body may be negligible, but if you stab at an acupuncture point it may anesthetize, and if you stab the back of the head (the brainstem), it may even kill. Building a gridded, homogenized mathematical model for the natural world is a good way to simulate and predict natural phenomena, but a model is, after all, a simplification of nature—not the other way around, as though nature were the implementation of the model.

Compared with that, designating the Three Gorges as the culprit is more reasonable. This reasonableness is not computed through some scientific model. Scientific thinking always tends to look at an object in isolation and to judge things through a linear causal relationship. In the sense of such a linear causal relationship, the Three Gorges cannot be regarded as the starting point of some chain of causes and effects—for example, taking the Three Gorges as the first event, then deriving one event after another, and finally arriving at the event of drought—because such a causal chain simply cannot be constructed. The associations among the elements of an ecological system are intricate and complex, and to extract a clear line from within them is extremely difficult. But the “culprit” we are talking about does not originally mean that kind of thing.

So-called culprit, chief offender, means the boss among the principal offenders and criminals. For example, Laden can be called the chief culprit among terrorists—what does that mean? In fact, Laden was not the first terrorist; most terrorist activities were not directly or even indirectly commanded by him, and eliminating Laden would not eradicate terrorism as a whole. But he can indeed be aptly called the “chief culprit,” because his position in the entire terrorist force was the most prominent, and even more because he played the role of exemplar and symbol. Thus, in opposing terrorism, one can appropriately take Laden as the focal point and target.

There is no doubt that the Three Gorges is precisely such a project, the most emblematic and most prominent one. Perhaps the direct impact of the project itself is negligible, just as Laden himself did not kill all that many people, but what makes a culprit a culprit, what makes a chief offender a chief offender, lies in its symbolic significance and its catalytic effect. Clearly, the Three Gorges symbolizes the attitude of complete conquest and control over nature; it flaunts the power of man conquering heaven, demonstrates the unfolding of such large-scale transformation projects, and the million-person resettlement of the Three Gorges is also the greatest illustration of the特色 of “拆哪” [demolish, where?]. Worship of science, fetishism of technology, blind pursuit of profit, contempt for land, hostility toward nature, forgetting one’s ancestors, disregard for the people, ostentation and impatience for quick success, and so on and so forth—all of these are concentrated and displayed in the Three Gorges. Driven by the Three Gorges, China’s dam construction entered a new高潮, while civil irrigation projects reaching deep into villages have remained neglected. All kinds of large and small excavation and development projects are spread across the country, and the ecologically ravaged environment is already beyond what it can bear. Such a total social condition is no longer just that one indistinguishable grid cell, is it?

Then what use is it to point the spearhead at the Three Gorges? Indeed, even if we were to blow up the Three Gorges now, there would be no improvement in the overall situation. The best course would be to “attack the heart and mind,” like Zhuge Liang’s seven captures and seven releases, until the other side truly submits from the heart. As for the present Three Gorges, even if we really could refute it, even if the pundits really admitted the dam’s faults (they have in fact begun to admit them), nothing much would change, because next they will demand more funding for “follow-up projects”; in order to solve the problems of the Three Gorges, they will go on building more water conservancy projects, spending money continuously to repair them and strengthen them. The pundits are only too happy to admit anticipated shortcomings, thereby winning more support, and the result is actually to reinforce the influence of the Three Gorges… The key is not whether to blow up the Three Gorges or eliminate dams; water projects are not necessarily always bad. Even if the relationship between humanity and nature ceases to be hostile and becomes friendly, among friends and relatives there may still be many activities of mutual opposition and mutual exploitation. The key is: how is it possible to make dams “submit” to nature?

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.