Feedback: notes from participants

When: September 25, 2003
Where: San Francisco, California
Who: 11 Sierra Club staffers
What: PBS's The Dammed

What did you like about the film or book?
We liked hearing the indigenous people's voices and admired the reporting skills it took to capture them. We acknowledged that the film accomplished something significant: It made us care about the plight of a people we never knew existed.

What didn't you like?
The gaps in information. Why didn't the film tell us more about the benefits of the dam (or lack thereof), and why didn't it tell us more about alternatives to big dams?

The sensationalistic ending. Why did PBS finish with the threatening quote from Arundhati Roy about the failure of nonviolence? (The interview posted on the PBS Web site ended with a discussion of her devotion to the Narmada cause.)

What were some highlights from your conversation? Ethan said the film reminded him of John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid, in which conservationist David Brower rafts the Colorado with the head of the Bureau of Reclamation, sparring about the merits of big dams. That historic trip happened in the 1960s, just about the time Nehru was making his "Dams Are the Temples of Modern India" speech launching the Narmada dam project. Maybe the United States and India are not so different after all. The globalization of bad ideas...

We had some fun talking about how we'd craft an exciting narrative on this topic. One dream scene: Arundhati Roy and an Indian bureaucrat floating down the Narmada River with a writer like John McPhee. Maybe next year...

Eva asked what we could do about the information in this film, other than feel miserable about the way things turned out for the villagers? Producer/director Franny Armstrong's response to the story was to make a film. Arundhati Roy wrote a scathing essay in her book The Cost of Living. For our part, people in the United States could try to get the word out about alternatives. We could try to make our own country a model for developed and developing countries alike. Those of us in publishing could do our bit to globalize good ideas, providing information—and real success stories—about the ecologically sane routes to prosperity. We could also publicize our country's mistakes so that others might avoid them. Jon suggested a magazine piece titled "Memo to the World From the United States: Five Mega-Mistakes You Can Learn From."

From: Joan Hamilton
E-mail: joan.hamilton@sierraclub.org