Earth Equity News

Grass-Roots Uprising Against River Dam Challenges Tokyo. By Martin Fackler, NYTimes, March 3, 2009. "First, the farmers objected to an ambitious dam project proposed by the government, saying they did not need irrigation water from the reservoir. Then the commercial fishermen complained that fish would disappear if the Kawabe River's twisting torrents were blocked. Environmentalists worried about losing the river's scenic gorges. Soon, half of this city's 34,000 residents had signed a petition opposing the $3.6 billion project. In September, this rare grassroots uprising scored an even rarer victory when the governor of Kumamoto prefecture, a mountainous area of southern Japan, formally asked Tokyo to suspend construction. The Construction Ministry agreed, temporarily halting an undertaking that had already relocated a half-dozen small villages, though work on the dam itself had not started. The suspension grabbed national headlines as one of the first times a local governor had succeeded in blocking a megaproject being built by the central government... The apparent victory brought a flurry of similar revolts by other regional governments against big public works projects."