Jennie Bailey

Highlighting grass-roots campaigns rising up against corporate abuses.

DAMMED PROJECT
The struggle to protect Iceland's wilderness. Jaap Krater reports.

The campaign to defend Europe's vastest wilderness continues. Iceland, with its vast geothermal and megahydro possibilities,
has potential for becoming a new frontier for energy craving industrial moguls in times of increasing energy scarcity and insecurity.
So what's wrong with megahydro? It's technically a 'renewable' source and surely it's clean in that it utilises the power of
water rather than fossil fuels. Not so, large dams have dramatic consequences. Ecosystems are destroyed and numerous
people are made homeless, often without adequate resettlement. There has not been much research into the contributions that large-scale hydro-electricity has upon climate change. During the summer of 2005 and 2006 the Saving Iceland campaign protested against the Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam project. This controversial project was being built purely to fuel ALCOA's aluminium smelter using renewable energy (to make aluminium vital for planes - spot the irony here anyone?). The campaign is now stepping up to bring industrialisation
of Iceland to a halt.
Stopping industrialisation and ecological destruction of the last unspoilt country in the west would be a major strategic victory and a new incentive for a global movement against industrialisation and ecocide. On the 6th July another camp in
Iceland will commence as new plans for dams, power plants, smelters and other heavy industry need to be stopped.
Some of the companies involved in flooding Iceland for profit include corporations such as: aluminium giants ALCOA and
ALCAN, Italian engineering group Impregilo (also a target of the successful Ilisu Dam campaign), Bechtel, Barclays and Mott McDonald.