Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

One of the groups opposing the construction of the Grand Inga Dam in the Congo is is a little-known but influential environmental NGO called International Rivers, based in Berkeley, California. While few people have heard of the organization, it has, since its founding in 1985, helped stop 217 dams from being built, mostly in poor nations. “If we think of forests as the lungs of the planet, then rivers most surely are the arteries of the planet,” the organization says on its website.114 But in 2003, Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist from The Washington Post, discovered International Rivers had severely misrepresented the situation on the ground in Uganda, where the group was trying to stop a dam. An International Rivers staff person told Mallaby that the Ugandan people near the proposed dam opposed it. But when he asked her whom he could interview to verify her assertion, she became evasive and told him that he would get in trouble with the government if he asked questions. Mallaby did so anyway, hiring a local sociologist to translate. “For the next three hours, we interviewed villager after villager, and found the same story,” Mallaby wrote. “The dam people had come and promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate. . . . The only people who objected to the dam were the ones living just outside its perimeter. They were angry because the project was not going to affect them. They had been offered no generous payout, and they wer...