Hydropower and Its Environmental, Socio-economic, and Political Implications

Abstract

Water is a renewable resource. In addition to being vital for all forms of life, it can be used to generate electricity. Driven by water, hydropower dams produce 16 percent of global electricity. Today, dams are being removed in the United States as their environmental impact becomes more apparent. At the same time, many more are being built worldwide, with some of the largest dams under construction or in design on the Roof of the World—the ecologically vulnerable and geopolitically contentious Himalayan region. Hydropower plays crucial roles in the world’s secure transition from dirty, unrenewable energy forms to clean, renewable sources, and in response to climate change and our pursuit of an ecologically sustainable future. How to harness water and utilize hydropower in technologically safe, environmentally conscious, socioeconomically just, and politically sensitive ways, however, still remains a question. Professor Ling Zhang’s (History) and Professor Noah Snyder’s (Earth and Environmental Sciences) collaboration takes on this question. By comparing various case studies in America and Asia, their project studies a wide range of issues in regard to hydroelectric dams, not only their problems, such as historical dam failures, damage to human settlement and livelihood, and habitat degradation, but also their potential service to energy transition and environmental sustainability.

Presentations

• Hydrological Cycle and Historical Societies, Global Asia Initiative of Duke University, February 2022
• Terrestrial Histories in the Hydrosphere, Global Asia Initiative of Duke University, February 2022
• Narrativizing Nature: Writing  Environmental Histories of China, Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, March 2022
• Verticality, Volume, Three-Dimensional History, Center of Chinese Social History, March 2022
• New Directions in Chinese  History: Celebrating Peter Perdue’s Scholarship, Yale, August 2022
• Joint Talk for BC’s climate change seminar group, October 2022
• APost-Mao Paradigm Shift?: Science and Technology in Late Twentieth Century China, Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2023
• Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change, Ohio State University, April 2023
• Presentation of paper, "When Mountains Become Islands: A Multispecies Tale after a Dam," the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, March 19, 2023.
• Invited lecture, "Seventy Meters Below Is My Home: Geotrauma and Earthly Memories in East China," Ohio State University, April 14, 2023.
• Invited lecture, "Four Places, Four Waters, One Fish," Center for the Studies of Chinese Social History, Shanxi University, June 5, 2023.
  

Additional Accomplishments 

• Visiting Fellowship at Cambridge (Zhang)
• Visiting Scholarship at Fudan University (Zhang)
• Multiple book chapters written (Zhang)