Pakistan,
whose rate of automobile ownership is 8 per 1,000 people (as
compared to 765 per 1,000 in the US), has contributed almost
nothing to the blanket of greenhouse gases warming the earth
and the oscillating weather patterns that result. But many Pakistani
observers attribute the scale of the flooding and displacement
in part to a series of decisions by the Pakistani state --namely,
the building of large dams at key points along the course of
the Indus. Dams, of course, are the quintessential symbol of
modernity in water infrastructure. Seeking to emulate the American
civil engineers who made the Californian desert bloom, post-colonial
states across the Middle East and Asia hurried to erect taller
and taller dams to catch the water that would enable a green
revolution in every river basin and churn out electricity to
light every city street. Aside from the social dislocation caused
by their construction, the dams’ sustainability is now greatly
in doubt.
For one thing,
dams are subject to the law of unintended consequences. In Egypt,
the dams around Aswan eliminated the annual flooding of the Nile,
allowing for reliable year-round irrigation and greatly expanded
agricultural productivity. But the yearly floods also had a cleansing
effect; now rural areas are pocked with stagnant pools where
the parasite that causes bilharzia flourishes. In Pakistan, the
blockage of the Indus has led to high soil salinity and greater
sedimentation upstream, robbing the delta of its richest soil,
and in effect raising the riverbed and making swathes of previously
dry land part of the floodplain.