Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

Chapter 3 covers the period in the 1970s and 1980s when the military regime finished its big dams and their reservoirs filled. During this time, the rise of international environmentalism pressured the military government’s dam builders to undertake environmental impact studies and design environmental mitigation programs. This chapter argues that the environmentalism that the military regime’s energy sector practiced was deficient and narrowly organized around two goals. The first was protecting power plant infrastructure from environmental threats such as sedimentation. The second was to showcase environmental care without fundamentally altering project designs or slowing down construction. For example, the military regime funded environmental impact studies, but did so belatedly, after committing to particular high-impact dam sites, and followed the studies’ recommendations selectively. Most dramatically, the military regime carried out animal rescue missions, which it hoped would showcase its environmental consciousness. These actions were “pharaonic environmentalism”: protection measures designed to bolster the image of the military dictatorship as a regime that could build durable mega dams while simultaneously protecting the environment.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

In 1968, the floodwaters of the recently completed Cocorobó Dam submerged the remnants of the site of the Canudos Massacre, one of the most traumatic and infamous episodes in Brazilian history. In the 1880s, a local preacher, Antônio Conselheiro, had amassed a large following and built a small settlement – which he named Belo Monte [Beautiful Hill] – near an area known as Canudos, an impoverished part of the semiarid interior of the northeastern state of Bahia. In 1889, military officers overthrew the monarchy that had ruled Brazil since independence (1822) and installed a republic. The new government soon came into conflict with the preacher and his followers, seeing them as a potential source of opposition.

Chapter 5 builds on the argument that the Brazilian military government largely ignored the social and environmental costs of its big dams because it was under pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and because it believed that its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters submerged cherished land and waterscapes that had been protected as national parks, engendered profound transformations to local fisheries, and set in motion ecological changes that led to devastating mosquito-related torments among communities living along the margins of reservoirs. To be sure, not all changes spelled disaster. Fisheries boomed in the decades following the formation of reservoirs, and malaria outbreaks were mild by historic standards. But in many places, disregard for the environment led to a series of local disasters that drew attention to the high environmental costs of big dams.

So, are dams good or bad? It is a popular question and one that has attracted a lot of attention from scholars and engineering professionals. The scholarly consensus suggests that most mega dams with giant reservoirs entail tremendous social and environmental damage, and that paying the full cost to remediate these impacts would render them less profitable than alternative forms of energy. However, such conclusions do not fit all dams and do little to dissuade those engineers, politicians, and citizens convinced that the widespread benefits of electrification are worth some social and environmental sacrifices at reservoir sites.

Chapter 2 covers the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Brazilian military government planned and began building its big dams. It argues that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build dams with giant reservoirs and to do so quickly and without regard to their social and environmental footprints. The dictatorship looked to hydropower projects as a means of powering industrial and economic growth that would legitimize military rule, and it wasted no time in starting construction because it takes a long time to build big dams, often the better part of a decade, and sometimes longer. The 1973 oil crisis added urgency, raising the price of imported petroleum and pushing the government to invest in alternative sources of energy. The crisis encouraged the military regime to double down on the big dams already under construction and to plan a host of new ones. Political pressures also made their way into debates about specific dam sites. The most prominent case was the binational Itaipu Dam (on the Brazilian-Paraguayan Border), where the military government had to weigh geopolitical considerations alongside other criteria. The result of all these political pressures combined was a firm commitment to building large reservoirs in environmentally sensitive areas without public debate and without completing thorough environmental impact studies.

Chapter 7 covers the changing nature of dam building in Brazil during the 1990s–2010s. It argues that during this period, mobilization for social and environmental justice among dam-affected communities began to play a greater role in the county’s dam-building program and that the movement’s priorities and achievements were not uniform. Brazil’s anti-dam movement has succeeded in modifying many new dams or blocking them outright, especially in the Amazon Rainforest, but has done little to achieve justice for the still-uncompensated Indigenous communities that were displaced by the dictatorship’s reservoirs. More than thirty years after being displaced, the Avá Guarani and the Tuxá, the Indigenous communities dispossessed by Itaipu and Itaparica, respectively, are still fighting for the land the government owes them. Climate-related challenges have been a second defining element of this period. Since the late 1990s, the Brazilian hydropower sector has endured at least three significant droughts that lowered reservoir levels, curtailing output and leading to rolling blackouts. Such episodes could become more common and severe under anthropogenic global warming. Thus, while the Brazilian hydropower sector has done much to mitigate carbon emissions, the impacts of anthropogenic warming threaten to curtail the degree to which reservoirs can produce such valuable low-carbon energy.

Chapter 6 tells the story of the Balbina Dam. Built during the 1980s, it was the military regime’s last and most controversial dam, and it encapsulates this book’s main arguments. Political pressures were instrumental in the decision to build the dam, whose floodwaters inundated a large area of the Amazon Rainforest that was inhabited by the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community. Instead of investing in meaningful environmental safeguards, the government planned an ostentatious greenwashing campaign. The result was social and ecological calamities on par with those at earlier dams. But there was one principal difference that made Balbina exceptional: timing. Balbina came on the heels of a spate of other controversial dam projects that had turned many Brazilians against big dams. Furthermore, the military regime stepped down in 1985, during construction, and the civilian government that replaced it finished the dam. The return to civilian rule emboldened dam critics to pressure the government for more effective safeguards, and though the civilian government did not suspend the project, it did implement better belated remediation programs than the military regime had done for its reservoirs. Balbina was thus the last of its kind and became a watershed moment in the history of Brazilian dams.