Silenced Rivers

An excerpt from Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, by Patrick McCully (Zed Books, 1996).

Excerpt from Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, by Patrick McCully, Zed Books, London, 1996

All rivers contain sediments: a river, in effect, can be considered a body of flowing sediments as much as one of flowing water. When a river is stilled behind a dam, the sediments it contains sink to the bottom of the reservoir.

Excerpted from the new introduction of the updated 2001 edition of:
Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams

It’s baloney and it’s much overblown . . . Methane is produced quite substantially
in the rain forest and no one suggests cutting down the rain forest.

Karolyn Wolf, spokeswoman for the US National Hydropower Association
responding to International Rivers press release on
greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs, 1995