BC Geographers Link Big Dams with Topocide

(Published in the Northeast News, March 17, 2009)

Jim Windsor is a geographer who now teaches at the University of Northern British Columbia. Alistair McVey, also a geographer, worked at the College of New Caledonia and North Island College, and is now retired. In an article published in The Geographical Journal, Windsor and McVey (2005) link big dams to a form of “place annihilation” known as “topocide.”

Topocide involves not only a loss of place, but a loss of “sense of place.” It is a sobering, double-barrelled concept that provides a way of understanding the consequences of Site C.

If Site C proceeds, the loss of place is a given. Over 80 kilometers of river valley would be flooded, submerging more than 5,000 hectares. That sounds like a lot of land, but the figure might not mean much to some people. Think of it this way: 5,000 hectares is roughly equal to 10,000 CFL football fields. The scale and totality of such destruction are difficult to comprehend.

Five-thousand hectares or 10,000 football fields is actually a very conservative estimate because this figure doesn't include land that would be affected by reservoir set-back lines, transmission lines, earth-fill quarries, etc. It is also important to note that we would be losing four major alluvial flats along the river bottom, roughly 1,300 acres of some of the best agricultural land in BC.

Ironically, the severity of the devastation would be increased if BC Hydro corrects past errors by executing a thorough “clearing plan” whose primary objective would be to remove as much organic matter as possible.

Affirming a connection made months ago in this column, Windsor and McVey note that dam construction leads to the kind of treeless, barren “deathscapes” typically associated with the scorched-earth tactics of total warfare. Photo 1 (below left) shows a World War I battlefield. Photo 2 (below right), courtesy of Donna Smith, shows some of the clearing that occurred during the construction of the Bennett Dam.

Furthermore, as people in this region know, reservoirs do not wash away the problem, exchanging a river for a nice lake. In the case of Site C, we would we would be left with a hazardous impoundment area potentially subject to debris from tributaries, accelerated erosion, an increased likelihood of landslides, increased fog and wind turbulence, and, depending on the effectiveness of the clearing plan, elevated levels of methylmercury, a neurotoxin that spreads through the food web.

Nor would wildlife in the valley simply move to higher ground. Wildlife biologists tell us that most of the animals will die.

The totality of the devastation associated with large dams leads to the second aspect of topocide. By killing everything in sight, we also destroy our own “sense of place,” our sense of belonging: “homes, fields, and roads are no longer there; the entire landscape has been obliterated.” And even if a reservoir is drained, “no landmarks, no cherished reminders of home” would remain visible beneath the sediment (Windsor and McVey, p. 156).

During the flooding of Williston, for example, the Beattie family’s Gold Bar ranch, famous throughout the north, was wiped off the face of the map. BC Hydro burned the main house, a beautiful, three-storey log home, “just before they started backing the water up behind the dam” (Pollon and Matheson, This Was Our Valley, pp. 210-221). Photo 3 (below left) shows the Gold Bar Ranch before the flood. Photo 4 (below right) shows the obliteration of the Gold Bar Ranch after the flood. Both images appear in This Was Our Valley.

Focusing on northwestern BC, Windsor and McVey tell how the people of the Cheslatta T’En First Nation were displaced by Alcan’s Kenney Dam on the Nechako River, during the early 1950s. The story has much in common with Tsay Key Dene Band’s experience of Williston Reservoir (see "Dust Has Not Settled for the Tsay Keh Dene," Northeast News, February 18, 2009, p. 18).

After the Cheslatta people were abruptly evicted from their ancestral lands, “their buildings were razed and their ranches bulldozed.” Eventually, a community church was also destroyed. Particularly disturbing to the Cheslatta was the eventual destruction of [a] cemetery . . . and the erosion of grave sites, which resulted in several coffins being carried downstream in the current” (Windsor & McVey, p. 155). The following two pictures, from Windsor and McVey's article, show the Chestlatta cemetery before and after the flooding: "The Cheslatta graveyard had, until its destruction, provided the [the people of the] community with a sense of identity and continuity with their past" (pp. 155-156).

Citing Justice Thomas Berger's findings during the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Windsor and McVey explain that dam-induced topocide has taken a particular toll on the people of First Nations communities, who "regard themselves as inseparable from the land, the waters, and the animals with which they share the world. They regard themselves as custodians of the land, which is for their use during their lifetime, and which they must pass on to their children and their children’s children after them."

In the heyday of dam construction, roughly forty years ago, society at large was somehow prepared to overlook the realities of topocide. It was acceptable to see the world through WAC Bennett’s eyes and believe that river valleys were there for the taking, that dams were monuments to progress. That day is over.

Recounting the wisdom of human geography, Windsor and McVey tell us that place is essential to personal and cultural identity, providing “a centre of human meaning, intentions, and values. Place is where commitments are made and obligations met.”

It’s time for all British Columbians to become more mindful of the Peace River region and to speak up in defence of the river after which this place is named.