Peru Building Crazy 12.5 Mile Tunnel Through Mountain for Irrigation & Electricity

Peru is sponsoring a project to divert river water from one region to another by constructing a 12.5 mile long tunnel through a 6000 foot high mountain. Is this a crazy abuse of human power, or a wonderful use of our capabilities?

The tunnel is part of the Olmos-Tinajones Hydroelectric-Irrigation Project and will divert water from the Huancabamba River of Peru’s Cajamarca region to the neighboring region of Lambayeque. It will be completed by year’s end, and will irrigate approximately 150,000 hectares of land (~ 375,000 acres) and generate up to 600 MW of electricity.

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Despite the obvious benefits this project will provide, in addition to an estimated 10,000 jobs, I think that there is something ridiculous about how far Peru’s government has decided to go to manipulate nature to meet human desires. For instance, how is this going to affect the Huancabamba River and its ecosystems? What about the land that is going to be converted to agriculture? Will significant habitat be altered for the worse ecologically? And what about the mountain?

There are obvious criticisms to my pro-nature perspective. Peru is an impoverished, developing nation and people need means to improve their livelihoods. Someone might also say that building such a huge tunnel is inspirational about what we as people can do to improve our lives. Or that perhaps the negative ecological impacts will not be so great as to merit concern.

Finally, there is perhaps another intriguing and more compelling idea: perhaps the project will create a new ecosystem with significant biodiversity. I doubt anyone would use this thought as rationale for the project and its benefits. But in recent years I have been surprised to learn that the Amazon Rainforest–one of the largest and most important ecological areas of the world– was perhaps transformed from something else to be what it is today in part because of human efforts.

In a 2007 article from the magazine Conservation, Fred Pierce explains the reasoning and evidence that suggests the Amazon Rainforest is not a “pristine” ecosystem. In what might be his most concise summary of this idea he writes that

what goes for the Amazon appears to be true for most other tropical rainforests. The primeval, virgin rainforest is a potent modern myth. But it may be just that. The truth is that, far from being virgin natural ecosystems, many rainforests, perhaps all, are complex artefacts. They are partly natural but partly also created by human activity, much of it constructive and beneficial to the wider forest. Rather than wilderness, they are abandoned gardens.

Without covering Pierce’s article in great detail, he explains that Amazonian peoples were dramatically altering landscapes to their own benefit for a considerable amount of time (not hard to believe). After their populations were decimated by the diseases brought by Europeans, their communities and transformations to the Amazon became less noticeable, despite being recorded in some accounts.

I doubt the Olmos-Tinajones Hydroelectric-Irrigation Project will be creating another Amazon Rainforest. But at least it’s always good to keep in mind that human interaction with the natural world is not always harmful– and can in fact be beneficial. Nonetheless, I think carving such a long mountain tunnel in Peru for the purposes of irrigation and electricity is an abuse of our power as stewards of the Earth.

Photo Credit: Mr. J Doe on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

* Please note, photo is not of the Peruvian project.

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