Paradise in Peril: Dams, Development and Domination

Abstract

Damming rivers is often seen as the panacea of the neo-liberal development paradigm. It is believed to be the fit all solution to problems of agricultural production, flood control, irrigation in arid and semi –arid regions, electricity generation as well as urban development. The industrialization of the world and the adoption of a capital intensive, mechanized and market-oriented production process has dramatically altered the environment as resource-extraction and resource consumption increased manifold. Nature, in fact, became a source of supply of raw materials for feeding the ever growing needs of modernization and development as well as a dump-yard for material waste, slowly heading towards a perilous condition. The paper, therefore, seeks to explore and investigate the issue of damming rivers as a domineering force over nature explicating the power of science over nature.