Changing the Terms of the Debate – Water for All - Patrick McCully Executive Director International Rivers – Interview

Water is the most exploited and extracted global resource. Millions of rural people around the world are "running dry" and struggle to access enough water for their household and food production needs. Millions more only have access to unclean water - hours from their homes - and insufficient quantities for sanitation.

International Rivers works to protect rivers and rights, and promote real solutions for meeting water, energy and flood management needs. The River’s network works to support communities around the world opposing destructive river development projects, and to promote sustainable and equitable freshwater management.

Changing the Terms of the Debate

Your organization has been around for 20 years. Briefly what would you say are your outstanding successes and biggest challenges?
Patrick McCully: Helping build local, national, regional and global movements against destructive dams and for sustainable, just and effective water and energy polices. Also raising awareness of the many drawbacks and failures of big dam-based development strategies.

International Rivers has launched a new web site. What have the primary challenges been in changing your name, brand and website?
Patrick McCully: Getting internal consensus on look of our new logo. The huge amount of work that is necessary to totally redesign a very information - rich website.

In the Middle East, for example, water is considered as new oil. Where in the Middle East is your organization active and what are the immediate plans for this region.

Patrick McCully: Although we have a staff member temporarily based in Tunis we are not working directly on any issues in the Middle East and do not plan to do so. The closest we work to the Middle East is Eastern Turkey (supporting opponents of the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris) and Sudan (supporting communities harmed by the Merowe Dam on the Nile).

In India there is an active organized campaign against building of the large dams. Where does that struggle stand at this point given that many of those dams are near completion?
Patrick McCully: There are many movements against destructive dams in India. The one you are referring to is probably that on the River Narmada. The movement there continues to fight for the rights to just compensation and resettlement for affected communities.

They are also opposing new dams planned for the valley and supporting better alternatives such as rainwater harvesting and mini-hydro.

You authored an important book "Silenced Rivers, the Ecology and Politics of Large Dams". What prompted you to write this book? Briefly what were you hoping to achieve by writing this book?
Patrick McCully: Concerns over the environmental damage and human rights abuses caused by dams. Also admiration for local activists opposing destructive dams and a desire to assist them with technical information and an international perspective.

I hoped to raise awareness globally about the value of undammed rivers, the problems with dams and the better ways available to supply water and energy.

When did you first become interested in water and river issues and why?
Patrick McCully: In the late 1980s when I was an editor with The Ecologist magazine in England. The other Ecologist editors were leading analysts of the problems with large dams and educated me about the importance of the issue.

What would the most important message you could send to people first becoming interested in water and river issues?
Patrick McCully: Healthy rivers and clean water are essential to all life on earth. Destroy our rivers and we destroy beautiful and valuable ecosystems and ultimately undermine the foundations for life.

The 20th century was the age of the Big Dam and the destruction of our waterways. If we are to thrive in the 21st century it must be the age of water protection and river restoration (as well, of course, for the benefit of our rivers and most other aspects of nature and society, the age of climate protection and decarbonization).

Any last comments?
Patrick McCully: Thanks for the chance to give my opinions.

Thank you.

Patrick McCully is author of Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, published by Zed Books (London) in 1996 (revised edition 2001) described by Booker Prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy as "a truly dazzling book."

Silenced Rivers has also been published in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Farsi.

Voices:

"A dam tears at all the interconnected webs of river valley life ... Dams are the main reason why fully one–fifth of the world’s freshwater fish are now either endangered or extinct."

Patrick McCully, author of Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams

"The war for the Narmada valley is not just some remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It's a war for the rivers and forests of the world."

Arundhati Roy, author of The Greater Common Good

Picturing Patrick McCully Executive Director of International Rivers