Bigthink - User Ideas Feed

A Canadian Worldview

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:22:02 +0100

Do Americans sufficiently respect Canadians?

Transcript:

Well Canadians and Americans have many similarities and most of us in Canada have family in the US because the families came over from wherever and some went to Canada, some went to the US. So, in a way we are very similar. In a way we are quite different. We live in a big harsh cold climate and our ancestors knew that if we didn’t share, we wouldn't survive. So, we invested more faith in our governments and collective notions and social programs and East-West links than Americans. I always say that our founding model or kind of ethos is sharing for survival whereas in the US it is more survival of the fittest and your founding principles of...

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…ours is peace, order, and good government. We are just kind of boring in comparison. So, we are…we have a different kind of model and sometimes I when…and I do a lot of work here in the US, but when I come here sometimes, I am stunned by the belief that everything is about the market and about even the environment, about entrepreneurship, green entrepreneurship right. Is it [Inaudible] somehow save everything and I was at a water conference in Lubbock, Texas a couple of years ago and nobody would…I mean they said…they put up this great big billboard or this big PowerPoint on the first day and just showed how the demand for water in Texas is going right up and that the water supply is going right down and this is a crisis and what are we going to do [Inaudible] and I said to them, you have got a private system here and the big losers can buy their way out of everything. You have got T. Boone Pickens, as if he isn't rich enough, going around buying up aquifers, water rights and sitting on them. Why don’t you say no to that? Why don’t you limit the amount of water any one person or corporation can own? Oh, well, that would go against you know capitalism and entrepreneurship and the market and they hate government and they don’t trust the government because they never do anything right. So, we kind of struggled for two days. At the end of the second day, I said, well, I don’t think I convinced you, but on the other hand, you didn’t answer the question you put up yesterday morning, which was that x…demand and supply. Lot of people came up to me and said, you really made me think. You really, you really made me think that maybe we have got to start looking differently. So, that was a real clash of two different kinds of thought processes. But I have fun in the US. I was on a call-in show not long ago and this guy called in and he said you are a bleeding heart liberal and I said hey, I am a Canadian. I don’t know what that means. We had some good fun with that.Oh, heavens, you guys don’t know anything about us. I tell you, we could blow up up there and I don’t know. I don’t think it would get first page on the New York Times or anywhere. We are just…it is funny, when I have been doing this book tour here. People at home say well you have been reading about such and such and I say, of course I have and unless they go online, there is no news about Canada here. It is just we know everything. I mean all the … I was in Hollywood. I was in Los Angeles for the first time a couple of weeks ago and every single street vying and all. I mean I know that this is part of our culture in Canada too because all of your networks, all of your magazines, all of your movies come here. I know everything about New York. I know about the St. Patrick's Day Parade. I know everything. It is famous in Canada. Most Americans know just about that about us and we kind of laugh about it. We kind of feel a little inferior sometimes and unloved and all of that, but it is an interesting phenomenon. You are…the US is the big guy on the block and most Americans don’t have to do anything about us except we are where the cold air comes from.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: What effect does population growth have on oil and water?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:18:56 +0100

The places that consume the most water, Barlow says, are not the places with exploding populations.

Transcript:

Well, it is important when we think about population and it is and I am concerned about that. We are talking probably around three billion people between now and 2050 and I do think it is an issue, but I also want to be careful to say because a lot of people then take that and use it as an anti-immigrant or potentially racist kind of thing. When we look at who is using the most energy and water in the world, it isn't the places in the world where the population is exploding. It is here in North America; we are the worst energy guzzlers and the worst water guzzlers, followed by Australia, which has no water left and Europe. So, it is very important for us I think to realize that it is the industrial model and the individual overuse and abuse of these resources that is the issue and when then you compound that with growing population, which is then growing in areas of the world that are industrializing. So, it is the industrializing China, the industrializing India with the class structure where their upper classes buying all the stuff and more that we have here, that is the thing that is unsustainable. So, it is the connection between population and consumerism and industrialization that we have to put together. If we in the global north don’t want the global south to destroy all of its water and energy sources, we better admit that our development model may not be the best one and that…but we are going to have to show some leadership as well in cutting back because how do you ask people in a poor country to cut back when we won't cut back ourselves. It is quite a lot to ask really if you think of it. It is like saying well, we will all cut our missions, we will all cut our water use or whatever by 20%, but if you are…somebody described it…if you are 80 pounds and you are supposed to cut your food consumption by 20%, you are going to die. If you are 200 pounds, probably you could cut your food consumption by 20% and then some, right? So, similarly, I think we could think of ourselves as being kind of gluttons in the global north and maybe we can cut more than our share so that the global south isn't taking the entire burnt.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: Are oil and water inextricably linked?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:18:08 +0100

It takes water to produce energy, and vice versa.

Transcript:

Yeah, they really are linked in a whole bunch of ways. We need a great deal of water to produce energy, hydroelectricity of course, and then through that the dams, the major dams that we use of course are one of the big issues we have around water. We are destroying water to get at new sources of energy like in the Tar Sands in Northern Alberta or coal methane gas mining, which uses a huge amount of water, but it also takes a lot of water to produce energy. So, if you are turning to nuclear power because you want to save money on board, cut down on fossil fuels [Inaudible] then you are destroying a lot of water to produce the energy through nuclear power. Biofuels is a perfect example of the combination. Here we are trying to cut down on fossil fuel production, so we don’t need to use so much in our cars right. So, we grow industrial biofuels that destroy huge amounts of water and it is almost like the part of government that is giving subsidies for biofuels isn't talking to the part of the government that is putting out the stats on the declining water sources. [Inaudible] talk to each other man. You think you can somehow can solve a problem by destroying something else and we are going to have to I think live differently a little bit. I was at a conference yesterday and heard a 91-year-old activist talking about that we are going to have to live more simply so that others can simply live, which I felt was a lovely term, but this notion of continued growth, which won environmentalist in the US has said has the same DNA as the cancer cell that it has to turn on itself in order to survive, it is not sustainable. We are going to have to import less and buy less and eat more sustainably, grow our food differently and we are going to have to ask the question, everything we do, everything we grow, everything we produce, everything, what is the impact on water. How much water was used for that? Can we afford that? Who should be paying for that if you are using more than your share? How do we do that? So, far it has been a…water has been a free for all. We have got tons of it. It comes out of the sky. What the heck? We got to stop that thinking and when we do, we will design our cities and our food production and our lives quite differently I think.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Innovative Water Conservation

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:18:01 +0100

We have to kick the notion that we are masters of the earth, Barlow says.

Transcript:

Actually, some good work was done here in the United States in the last 15-20 years around water conservation. New buildings had to have low flush toilets and so on in some states. A lot of states are breaking that, but there are very basic things that we can do from making sure again back here to the US, making sure the infrastructure is repaired so we are not losing water and we are not pumping in dirty water from these old pipes. That would make a huge difference. It would mean once people really trust their tap water, they could stop drinking bottled water. They should stop it anyway, but they would really…the more they trust their tap water, the less they are likely to do that, which means you stop pumping the aquifer so fast. More sustainable agriculture and there are a lot of people turning to local organic food production. We are saying things like when you buy flowers on Valentine's day, buy local. If they have come from far away, they have probably come from situations where some water is being destroyed in some community and we just put out a report about the flower industry around Lake Naivasha in Kenya in the Rift Valley where Out of Africa was filmed…that gorgeous film Out of Africa…and it is being destroyed by the European Rose industry…rose as in roses, flowers…these big businesses have surrounded the lake because they are growing roses. It is in water intensive and they don’t want to use the water in Europe, so they are using the water here and they are destroying the lake. It will be and I quote "a putrid puddle in five to 10 years." It is a gorgeous lake where Robert Redford - see I was there, I could see Robert Redford landing his plane and Meryl Streep saying hello and he was just beautiful. It is going to be dead…dead…a dead lake and so, it has got the last wild hippopotamus herd in East Africa. I mean it is really a tragedy and this is just a story that is repeating itself all over the world. So, yes, there are many reclamation projects, but they do…I really think mean that we are going to have to think differently about our economic systems. We are going to have to have economic policies that promote and support local production and local more organic sensible food production. The Green Revolution in the Third World is a disaster because it used chemicals and those chemicals needed way more water, so that you could disperse the chemicals and so they just dried up entire regions. So, we are going to have to come back with things people knew a long time ago. Lot of the indigenous knowledge, a lot of the knowledge that our farmers had before we started industrial farming and our cities were going to have to build different cities. We are going to have to build cities that have lots of parks. I love your park here. I jogged in Central Park this morning. Growing things on our roofs…roof gardens and leaving the rivers and the streams so that we build around. We don’t build over. This dominance of humans that we can somehow master nature…got to get rid of that. Got to come to a place where we are more respectful of the earth that gave us life and the water that sustains that life.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: Is there an international solution to the water crisis?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:17:56 +0100

Barlow describes her Blue Covenant.

Transcript:

Well, I call the book is called Blue Covenant because I feel that we need to have this covenant around water and the covenant that I am talking about would have three parts. First is the covenant from humans and that is through our governments to some extent and through the United Nations and whatever with the earth to stop destroying water and that is probably the most important thing we can do. We have to stop polluting surface water and it has to be considered a crime to pollute and we have to remember the words of Martin Luther King who said legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless. For those who will not voluntarily stop destroying water, we have to force them to do that. We have to stop over pumping ground water. It is not sustainable. There are 23 million borewells in India alone, going 24x7, just taking that water up. It is water mining. We are not allowing…it is not the sustainable use of that water. It is water mining. That has got to stop. We have to retain water and bring back water into watersheds and we have to see ourselves more as a species that needs to live within nature's rules than try to bend nature to our rules with our technology and so on. So, that is the first and that means more sustainable agriculture, that means we are not going to be able to grow [Inaudible] in the desert the way we are doing now. We are just going to have to change our way of life much more local buy in, local sourcing and so on. The second part of the covenant would be a covenant to equality and justice around water which would be to understand the roots of poverty in the global south and in the global north and to really address it, so that water is equitably distributed. We call it water for all. We believe deeply that every one that that right and finally, we are talking about a kind of covenant with democracy that we feel that this should be publicly overseen, that the water, everything about it should be public in terms of oversight, public accountability. We have a right to know who has got hold of our water and believe me, there is nothing more fundamental in a community than some great big corporation from another country coming in and saying thanks very much, thanks for taking care of that water, it is ours now. Believe me, it doesn’t matter whether you are Left or Right or you live in the global north or the global south, it is something that just gets your…just puts a bee under your bonnet about that notion and people get up and say, excuse me, I mean, in Stockton, California, there was a coalition of environmentalists and community activists and Right wing Evangelicals…I mean it was just wonderful. It was a real coalition of people…the Evangelicals said that is God's gift to us. You can't take it and make it a for profit thing. No matter what their reasons for coming together. It was a wonder coalition that came together to say, get out. It is our water. So, it has been really interesting politically to watch what this issue does and when we demand this democratic accountability, people really respond to it and we are working at the United Nations to word a basic covenanteric convention that says water is a human right. Because in the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, water was not included because whoever knew then that you could even conceive of a time when water would be disputed like this. I mean it just wasn’t in people's consciousness, but now it is and so we want that right enshrined at the United Nations and other places.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: Do you foresee wars over water?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:17:08 +0100

Darfur is already such a war, Barlow says.

Transcript:

Oh, there will be wars over water. There are wars over water now. Darfur was a water war. People don’t know that. It was a water dispute between the nomads and the farmers that the government then took advantage of, instead of helping to solve the dispute, to unleash their terror. The Middle East is very much about water and the inequitable access to water by some people. China, I talked earlier about the fact that China is going to build this great big pipeline and take water from the Tibetan Himalayas that belongs to rivers that feed Asia. I can imagine watching that as a potential area. There are already huge fights between communities and big corporations. One of the first water wars was in a place called Cochabamba, Bolivia in the late '90s when Bechtel, the big engineering company set up a subsidiary to deliver water on a for profit basis and the first thing they did was raise…this triple the price of water and then they said to people and we are going to charge you for the water that you gather in big cisterns and pots on your roof and people said…water comes from the sky. What do you mean, you are going to charge us for that water. Well, all the water here belongs to us now and so you have to pay us for that water. People took to the streets and there were people killed. The army was brought in. There was a civil war. Really strong struggle. The people won. Bechtel was forced to leave. So, these struggles are already happening and they are even happening between people. One of the saddest stories in my research was that this farmers in this valley called the [Inaudible] Valley in Indonesia, where Nestle the big water bottled water company from Europe has been in draining the water sources, they get up in the morning and the water pools in a particular area and the farmers go with knives and machetes to fight each other for the water. I mean they get up really early and they go out and they fight to get that little bit of water. So, I think that the disputes around water are going to be from human being to human being. It is going to be from humans and other species as we take more of our share of water and other species don’t have access. It is going to be between those of us who believe water is a public service and our right…a human right… and those who think it is a commodity and so these big corporations. It is going to be between countries I think. You are going to find it between states, try Georgia and Tennessee as they start to think about redoing the boundaries so Georgia has access to water or Mexico which is claiming more of the Colorado, because the Colorado doesn’t reach there anymore. I mean I can see as the water dries up and the Colorado is in catastrophic decline. That is the term that a group of scientist used recently; catastrophic decline. You can imagine what the population growth in there and that there is going to be disputes around water. Who has the right to have swimming pools and golf courses when other people can't afford water. In Arizona, they are pioneering there is a big consortium planning a water park in the desert that will have waves that are so big that you will be able to surf and a river that runs so fast and has so much water, you will be able to white water raft on it. I mean this is insanity. So, you are going to see a dispute between people with that kind of crazy money that can do that or these kind of crazy ideas or even Las Vegas that uses so much water with its fountains and so on. There is going to be disputes that end up to some extent in wars and the last thing I should say about that is in researching my book, Blue Covenant, I was struck by how much the government here in the United States, the current government and the Pentagon have suddenly discovered water as a national security issue. By that, I mean just as they see energy as a…America is running out of energy, we need to secure friendly supplies of energy so they are looking to Canada. Canada is the biggest supplier of energy to the United States now, as they want to wean themselves off Middle East energy. Similarly, I believe that the United States is getting ready to seek water sources outside its borders to be secure water supplies for future times. I think they are looking at the Guarani aquifer which is a big aquifer in South America and I think they are looking at the water in Canada's north, which runs north. We don’t have lots of water along that border. We have got the great lakes, but we share that with the United States and it is in decline. The water we do have is in great big rivers running in the north, but they flow north. So, to get at that water would mean reversing the flow of that water, which would be like the Three Gorges Dam type technology in China. Big dams. Big reservoirs and then you would have to pump it through pipes using what? nuclear power, I am not sure, to get that water to go south. There would be great resistance in Canada to that because of the destruction it would create in the north. I see these kind of geopolitical struggles taking place as the two super powers China and the United States and I consider China a super power now…the two super powers vie for these resources, water, force, mineral, energy, fish.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Rating the Candidates on Water

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:17:00 +0100

Barlow hasn't heard nearly enough about the environment in this election.

Transcript:

Well, I am a Canadian. So, I am loathe to get involved in your election. I am mad at my own government, so it is not me coming down and lecturing you. Our government is also what we call them Bush Light. I mean they have done the same kind of hands off of the environment, handing over our clean…our protections for clean water and so on. So, I haven’t heard though with from what I have seen and I watch pretty closely television. We get all your stations and all your media. I haven’t heard nearly enough talk about the environment from any of the candidates in either of the parties. It is…I mean healthcare is tremendously important and the economy and so on, but it tends to be more those and I still think we are missing this subject, we are certainly missing the water subject. You just don’t hear the issue of water. I don’t understand it. I mean I was in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January and I think this is a state running out of water and they are depending on the snow melt from the mountains right and they are cutting down those trees and those bushes that protect the snow so fast. There was no talk of it. I didn’t see signs saying please conserve our water. We are running out of water. It reminded me of this [Inaudible] cartoon [Inaudible] dogs in a raft and the big ships going down right. You can see they have been…they have jumped in a life raft and one of them says ok, everybody in favor of eating all the food at once put your hands up. It is like we are running out of water, maybe if we cut down some more trees, we can really run out of water fast and I stated this in one of these houses and condos they have and the shower had two speeds, off and hurt. It showered so hard it was kind of like…it is that level of consciousness that we need and I guess it is not going to come from the top. I think it is going to have to bubble up from the bottom and this movement, it is also here in the United States of people fighting for their water rights, whether it is fighting in Manchester, California against Nestle taking their water off the mountains or in Fryeburg, Maine, where they are fighting Poland Springs or the river keepers who are doing wonderful work cleaning up Americas rivers or the Clean Water Action network. I mean there are so many groups that are fighting or Food & Water Watch, Corporate Accountability International doing wonderful work on bottled water. Take back the tap campaigns. I think it is going to come more from the bottom [Inaudible] enough of a scare which is why I wrote the book, which is why there are these wonderful films. There is a new film called FLOW: For Love of Water with a wonderful woman director named Irena Salina, who lives here in New York, which won the Mumbai Film Festival and was premiered at Sundance. With these films and books, we are hoping to get people really understanding the crisis upon us and that we should not and I hope we don’t have to wait until we are turning on the water and it is not there. I talked to somebody yesterday, who was in Pakistan and went to the Bhutto family home. This is before Benazir Bhutto was murdered and 75% of people in Pakistan have no access to clean water, none. 75%. They showed them in there that they turned on the water and no water came out of the tap. Think about that. No water came out of the tap. Now, the Bhuttos are wealthy. So, they truck pure water in. They don’t care where it comes from. But if you are not wealthy, think about turning on the tap and no water coming out. I mean when I first discovered, really discovered, water, in a poor community in Bolivia years ago and I really looked at it, I then came home to my house in Ottawa, Canada, and I said, I looked around at my own water access. I am not rich. I have seven outlets for water in my house if you count the laundry room, kitchen, bathrooms, and the little tap out front and out back and so on. I could put them all on at once if I wanted and I could just run it and nobody would say anything. Who would know? There is just this access that we have and this way of looking at it as if it will never dry up and that we have this right to it and other people in the world have none. I keep saying to people, if you don’t care for yourself, if the others have none doesn’t bother you, it will come here. It is going to visit here. This is the world. People need to see the world as…like a living organism and just like the blood that runs through your veins is all a part of everything and if you poison it here, it is going to hit back here or here. Similarly, if we destroy the water which is the life blood of the planet, if we destroy it in one place, it will come back to us elsewhere. If only the billions of people are going to want to come to where there is water and they are going to want to come to places like around the great lakes and so on and the great lakes are declining. So, it is in our best interest to make sure that people around the world are living within water means and caring for their water because the water refugees will be upon us and what will we do then. These are really big questions and I am disappointed that they are not being debated in these elections coming up.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: Are water laws enforceable?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:16:56 +0100

There needs to be a political will to enforce laws like the Clean Water Act, Barlow says.

Transcript:

The Clean Water Act is a very important act here in the United States and in fact there is good legislation here in the United States to protect water. More could be done. The problem has been enforcement, particularly under this current administration. In the last, almost eight years now, the Bush administration about over 4000 environmental rules have been gutted or ignored entirely. The trust has been given over and the responsibility for all the environmental areas of concern to large corporations. The Bush administration started this when Bush was governor in Texas and he has taken this into the White House where he basically says to the energy companies, the automobile companies, the forestry companies, and the mining companies, go on into the national force and monitor yourselves and polish yourselves and beat yourselves up if you want or don’t if you don’t want to and he has just…he has gutted the reporting mechanisms in just an astounding way. So, I think Americans need to understand and I want to say this…this is not a Left or Right issue. This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an issue of survival of our beautiful country, of North America, of our world and our people. Water scarcity isn't a Left or Right issue when you wake up one morning and you have got no water. So, I really think we need to take it out of that discourse and place it in a discourse of survival and also of conservation. I mean people on the left and the right have cared about conservation of parks and water ways and you don’t have to be left or right to care about the Hudson River that if your kid happens to fall in, then you are not going to be worried that he is going to get swallow water and die and that we need to preserve this gorgeous place that we have been given to live on and I just wish we could take it out of those kind of Left-Right debates. That being said, I think this government has to be held accountable for its appalling lack of respect for the environment and its abandonment of the tenets of the Clean Water Act.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: What is the Blue Planet Project?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:16:11 +0100

Barlow believes that no one owns the water.

Transcript:

Blue Planet project is a project of my organization in Canada called The Council of Canadians and we are fighting for the right to water around the world. We work very closely with Food and Water Watch here in the United States and many organizations around the world, building this global water justice movement. We believe that if you ask the question, who owns water, we say the answer is nobody owns water. It belongs to the earth. It belongs to all species. It belongs to future generations. It is a fundamental human right and it is public trust. So, we feel very strongly that we have to…we in the global north in our movements have to be supportive and act in solidarity with the global south where they don’t have the resources and they, sometimes we are working with groups who have one computer held together by duct tapes sort of thing and it is really helpful is we can not come down and rescue them because this is…that is a terrible model and that is not what we are talking about, but rather sharing resources, sharing information, sometimes sharing actually sharing getting some funding for the projects that are happening there. So, that is what we do at the Blue Planet project. We also challenge what we call the Lords of Water and this is the World Water Council, which is an international organization that is made up of members from the united nations and the World Bank and the big water companies and the water services development agencies of northern countries like Canada and the US. They come together in this big world water forum every three years and they announce that everybody agrees that a private future for water has been agreed to and we say, not so fast. The people of the world haven’t quite agreed to this. So, we go to these forums and we challenge them. We get up to the mikes and we challenge them from the floor and we challenge them in the media and we bring our own people and we tell the stories of what privatization and lack of government support for water has done in communities around the world. We tell that truth if you will to their power and they are not so fond of us, but that is ok, because you got to take your lumps and so at the same time that we are working in communities for local support and control of water, we are challenging the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations when we need to, although we also work with the United Nations because it is kind of schizophrenic around this issue, so there is good parts of it as well. We just challenge these power brokers who are making decisions around the future of water for people all over the world without their permission. So, we kind of try to act as a broker in a way between those powerful forces and some of the truly poorest communities on earth. I mean I have been in, worked in and with The Wretched of the Earth as Frantz Fanon called them. It is really…it is just saying over and over and over again, nobody should have to live like that. Nobody should have to die like that.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: How have international trade agreements complicated the water issue?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:16:02 +0100

Governments cede control of their water because of acts like NAFTA and the WTO, says Barlow.

Transcript:

Well, it is interesting…it is because of trade agreements that I got into this issue in the first place. Water was placed in NAFTA and actually the trade agreement that came before NAFTA, which is the first trade agreement, free trade agreement, in the world, the Canada-US free trade agreement signed in 1989 and then morphed into NAFTA, then that became the model for the WTO (The World Trade Organization) and water is in NAFTA and the WTO as a good and what that means is that once you start exporting your water for commercial purposes, you basically lose control of it. It is not your water anymore and you have to continue to export it and it is also in NAFTA as an investment. So, I will give you a very specific example and it is…as an investment where a corporation can sue the government of another NAFTA country if that country changes its rules. So, I will give you an example. In Northern Alberta there is something called the Tar Sands and the Tar Sands is a huge area, the size of New Brunswick. It is huge…maybe twice the size of Florida that has this sticky, thick, heavy oil in this thing called bitumen. It is like tar. Just think of tar and sand. To get at this and we are producing oil from this because we are running out of conventional oil all over North America and this is for export to the United States and Canada. To get at that oil, we have to use massive amounts of water and these corporations and they steamblast this bitumen and this heavy oil and then the oil warms up and comes to the surface and then they are able to take it off, but it is destroying the water table in Northern Alberta including the Athabasca watershed basin and the Peace River and so on. It is a really big issue there. People are now talking about oil or water. So, you can’t have both, but many of the corporations that are operating this are American. So, if the Alberta government were to say, well, we are going to say, we are going to restrict the amount of water you can use because you are destroying this water or you have to use gray water or you are just going to have to find ways to conserve or we are going to cut you off. Canadian companies operating there would have to abide by it. American corporations under NAFTA could sue for compensation, financial compensation because the government changed the rules of engagement. So, these corporations get huge rights under NAFTA and under the World Trade Organization agreements to basically constrain what governments can not just in water, but in many, many other areas. They also are trying to get at the World Trade Organization water included in the general agreement on trade and services, so that if a city like Atlanta is a good example, brought in privatization, brought in Suez the big water company from France, and then changes its mind because it turns out it is a mistake, if they had water as a service in the WTO, you wouldn't be able to do that. You just can't undo a privatization once it has happened. So, it really is…these trade agreements support private over public in all sorts of ways and they force governments to look to a private answer when a public answer might be preferable. So, between the World Bank and the World Trade Organization forcing privatization of water services, it is a real struggle for us, just to continue to fight for the basic right to water. Again, we are not saying people shouldn't pay for water after a certain level of use, but not to a transnational corporation when that water is just going to go to pay overseas investors and outrageous salaries of the CEOs. Any money we collect for water or water services, should go back to infrastructure building and so on. Here in the United States there are probably a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure building needed. People won't like to talk about waste water and sewage and stuff. Their eyes kind of glaze over and they think it is boring, but actually the system in the United States is very old. The pipes are leaky. They are rotting. They are allowing the discharge of really unsafe stuff into water ways and the Federal Government used to fund quite a bit for infrastructure funding in this country. It does not anymore. So, I am involved in the United States with Food And Water Watch. I am chair of the board and we are calling for a clean water trust fund at the Federal level, where we would, the Federal Government would have a trust fund built up over the years that could pay for this infrastructure repair as you don’t always to go cleaning up dirty water at the end; if you protect it at the source, you don’t have to spend nearly as much in the end. This could be a cost saving device as well.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: Is water a human right?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:15:56 +0100

Unfortunately, most governments don't believe it is, says Barlow.

Transcript:

I believe water is a human right. A lot of people don’t. Your government doesn’t. My government, I am a Canadian, we don’t…my government doesn’t [Inaudible] it either. I just like…I am shocked that in the 21st century our governments are denying the concept, but they don’t want to be responsible for it, so they don’t want to support this resolution at the United Nations. The big water corporations don’t want it to be a right. They say it is a need that can be delivered by anybody. So, they certainly don’t want to see this as a right. The World Bank doesn’t see it as a right. The World Trade Organization doesn’t see it as a right, but there is a whole growing movement around the world. We call it the global water justice movement. These are communities in some of the poorest places on earth, but also here in the United States and places like Stockton, California, where they just retook back the water system from a private company or Atlanta that kicked Suez out or Michigan where they are fighting Nestle and the water takings that are taking down the unit for bottled water that are taking down the water tables. There are water struggles going on around the world and around the United States and we all know each other. We have kind of connected into this wonderful movement and support each other. We deeply believe that water is a human right and not a commodity and actually we call it part of the commons that when you are born, you have certain inalienable rights. You have the right to air, clean air. You have the right to clean water. No one should be allowed to deny you water because you can't pay for it. It is just one of those things that you are given as a citizen of the earth, one of the species. I also think other species have right to water. If we don’t protect water for nature, other species are going to die and if we don’t care about them for themselves, we should care about them for us because we are dependent on the chain and we [Inaudible] if the chain doesn’t live. So, we need to see water as a right not only for humans, but other species and for the earth itself and we have to protect watersheds. We have to stop moving water massively from where it has been needed by nature to us. I will just give you one example. When you take water from an aquifer or watershed or river or whatever and then you send it to a great big megacity and that megacity is on the ocean, that megacity once it uses its water dumps it into the ocean where it becomes salinated instead of returning it cleaned back into the system. Then you are removing massive amounts of water from the watershed and eventually the watershed dries up and eventually the watershed turns to desert and if it turns to desert, it doesn’t attract the rain because you need vegetation for the rain… the cycle to work. So, it is a vicious cycle that is creating more desert everywhere while we just continue to abuse water and not understand that we have to maintain the ecosystem health of watersheds. In fact we have to bring back rain working with scientists who talk about the right to domicile of the drop of rain which really took me a long time to get my head around…like what does that mean. Well, you have to protect the actual rain cycle. You have to protect the hydrologic cycle because it also is vulnerable to our mistreatment of it. so, it is looking at this human crisis and this ecological crisis together because if you are just saying well, this is the human rights issue, but it is an issue of poverty and then over here people are saying it is an environmental issue. No, they come together and we need to understand and we are building a movement towards putting these issues together. It is a long slog as you can imagine.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: How has the world's water been commercialized?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:15:08 +0100

Water is blue gold, Barlow says.

Transcript:

Well, as you can imagine, if we have something you need for life and the demand is going like that and the supply is going like that, you know they are crossing, no surprise, you get private sector interest coming and saying, well, there is a gold in that there and then there are hills right [Inaudible] there is gold in that blue. I call it blue gold. There is gold in that water. So, from every facet of water from the delivery of water to your home or the treatment of waste water to bottled water to now these great big desalination plants, water recycling, even getting into nano technology, cloud seeding, so one diligent China steals the rain before it gets to the next. We are beginning to see what I call a corporate cartel around water, which is that water is beginning to be claimed and owned by private sector interests even before it is out of the ground almost. I see it…I think we can compare it to energy companies so that when a new drop of…or new find of gas or oil is discovered, it is owned and spoken for by a corporation before it is even out of the ground. I worry about this very much because as corporations control more and more of the water in the world, they are going to be able to charge exorbitant prices. Already, it is charging exorbitant prices for a bottle of water. If you can afford it, to heck with you right? So, what is happening is that water is going to be taken out of the price range of millions and millions of people already in the third world. Millions of people haven’t got access to water that…who would access to water if they could buy it. Big companies like Suez and Veolia have been forced on the global south countries by the World Bank and they come in and they run these water systems on a for profit basis. Sure, there is water, but if you can't pay for it, they turn your tap off, they turn the meter off. That is beginning to happen here too. A few years ago in Detroit, the water authority there turned the water systems off to 42,000 families, mostly African Americans, older people, poor people, who couldn't pay their water bills because the water bills were jacked up and then they turned around and they send social services in and they took the kids away if they had small children in the house, because they couldn't provide water to the kids. So, it is really, a really serious thing and you are going to hear more of that in the whole of the north, the global north and North America and Europe and so on where we have lots of poor people and even the middle class is going to have trouble paying water bills when they are jacked up three times to four times to what they are now. Water is probably going to have to reflect more of its real value in terms of we are probably are going to have to charge, but we need to provide a certain basic amount of water for human needs everyday to people free of charge and what is happening in the developing world is that they haven’t been doing it that way. They say maybe a tiny bit, but it is not enough to live on. So, people are in crisis everywhere. Then, there is bottled water and bottled water, last year we put something like 50 billion liters of water in plastic around the world, creating just mountains of plastic garbage. Using more fossil fuels, more energy of course, which contributes to the whole global warming phenomenon. It is another way of privatizing water, because if you say well, I am not going to trust tap water anymore and that is foolish, because North America your tap water is safe as in bottled water. It is more regulated than bottled water, but if you say well, I don’t trust it anymore, so I am going to bottled water, then you are basically saying I don’t care what comes out of the tap. So, I am not going to pay taxes to have the infrastructure repaired so that the water coming out of the tap is safe because I don’t care. Because I am not drinking that stuff anymore. So, it is a disconnect from the public tap and the more we disconnect, the more some people will have bottled water they buy and other people will have a system that maybe allowed to deteriorate because those people buying bottled water, who are richer and probably more powerful don’t care anymore. So, it is a really vicious cycle. We have to care what comes out of the tap, not just for us, but for our neighbors, for people we even don’t know because public health is connected to public water which is why we got public water in the first place. New York had private water at one point and it was such a disaster, this was a century ago, it was such a disaster that they…the government took it over and said we will run it as a public service. The reason was not so altruistic that everybody has the right, although some people believed and still believe that…I believe that…but it was also that the only way to fight the public diseases was diphtheria and these kind of things was with clean water for everybody and so if you had that stability and that health, that gave you the economic basis to build your resources and to build up a domestic economy. So, clean water was a very important found. Clean public water was an important foundation of our wealth in the North and we need to remember that. There is a reason that you have good, clean water for everybody, just like…I think there should be a reason to have good healthcare for everybody because it benefits the whole society and it is expensive when people get sick from dirty water.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

Re: What does a water shortage mean?

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:15:03 +0100

We already have thousands and thousands of water refugees, Barlow says, and it may get worse.

Transcript:

Well, we already have water refugees in the world. Thousands and thousands of people who are seeking water and so moving from where they have run out of water or they created deserts to places where there is water. Already, there are two billion people living in parts of the world that don’t have enough water. Well, one billion who have absolutely no access to clean water at all. So, they die. I mean basically, when you have…no can't afford water because they are pricing it, you go to the rivers that have cholera warning signs on them and that is the water you use and you watch your kids die a horrible death. More children die in our world of water borne disease every day than HIV, AIDS, war, traffic accidents, and malaria put together. It is the number one killer of kids and it is absolutely totally preventable. Half the hospital beds in the world… half the hospital beds in the world are filled with people who would not be there if they had access to clean water. I call it the inconvenient truth about water. I think that the way the consciousness about green house gas emission and climate changes now suddenly begun to permeate everybody's mind, I think similarly this issue around water has got to get to that level where it is just really fundamental for people, but living without water is a crisis and then if you are in a wealthier country like Australia that is running out of water, people aren’t dying. That is absolutely true, but there is now a whole new frantic feeling about water and people telling on each other if they water their lawns at night because they are not supposed to. I mean they are now on boiled water alerts, they are on really, really strict water diet in the major cities because Sydney has maybe three to five, maybe 10 years of water, conventional water sources left. So, they are building these great big desalination plants, which are expensive and energy intensive, and produce a very highly polluting brine that you put back out into the ocean and in my opinion is what you do when you run out of every other option right, but I mean, instead of thinking about real serious conservation and understanding that we have to change our ways and we have to protect source water, we are still in denial and people need to understand that the Atlanta story is a story you are going to hear more and more and more about, even here in North America where we have had this myth of abundance of water.

Recorded On: 3/17/08

The Water Crisis

Bigthink — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:14:56 +0100

Destroying our water sources while demand for clean water skyrockets.

Transcript:

The singular issue is something we never thought could happen and that is we are actually running out of fresh water for the demand that is increasing in our world and we are also destroying water retentive landscapes every where by our pollution displacement abuse of water, moving it from where it is needed in nature to where we want it and then we destroy it or we dump it in the ocean or whatever or we use it to water deserts or we export it out of our watersheds and one way and another, we are creating new deserts where we needed water retentive hydrologic cycles. So, huge parts of the world are actually beginning to run out of water. This is the most important thing I can say. It is not cyclical drought, which we keep hearing about and oh, if the rain comes back, everything will be fine or it is just global warming affecting water. No, it is not just global warming affecting water. It is water affecting global warming. It is our treatment of water actually destroying whole areas that have been fertile and able to grow food and so on. So, we have parts of the world, all of Northern China, which is using its water to produce running shoes and toys instead of feed people and [Inaudible] watersheds. Huge parts of India, 22 countries in Africa, all of the Middle East, Australia hit the water wall. Mexico City is sinking in on itself and large parts of the United States - South Eastern and South Western United States are all in a more than just a cyclical drought, are actually physically running out of water.

Most dire circumstance is probably Africa. One in three people in Africa now has no water or no access to clean water and in 10 to 15 years, that will be one in two. I mean those are the…that is the trajectory in terms of the terrible kind of numbers. Northern China is in terrible crisis. China has decided to…the Chinese government to build a massive pipeline from the Tibetan Himalayas and take the snow melt that now feeds the rivers that feed five major rivers that provide water for all of Asia and it is just going to take that water because it is 400 of the 600 cities in Northern China are in water crisis. They are talking about moving the capital away from Beijing because there are great big dustballs and tumbleweed going through the city. They are creating an area of desert the size of Rhode Island in China every single year, every year there is a new area that big from the displacement of water. They are just taking it from where we can get at it to where we can't as a species get at it. But here in the United States, it is really important for people to understand that the South West is in deep trouble. The Colorado is in catastrophic decline. There is a recent report that shows that Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are the backup reservoirs for that region are themselves in decline and one report said that within 10 to 13 years, Lake Mead could be gone. I don’t even think we can conceive of this…of the seven states that depend either on the Colorado or on the Rockies, the snow melt from the Rockies are all in crisis. Thousand people a day moving in to Florida. The demand for water is far outstripping its ability to provide water. So, they are pumping the ground water so fast that there are great big sinkholes opening up in houses and even shopping malls are dropping into these sinkholes. So, the crisis is not just far away. It is really important for people to understand the crisis is here in North America. The crisis is here in our backyard and we have to start taking it seriously. I felt so angry for the people of Atlanta that they were kind of surprised that they woke up one morning a few months ago and were told they had no water. Why in Heaven's name were they not told that this crisis was coming? Why were people not prepared? Why was there not conservation implemented? It is really I think an indictment of our political leaders that this refusal to deal with this and to see the nature of the crisis and to read these reports. They are coming from the United Nations. They are coming from the Pacific Institute, the Worldwatch Institute, the World Bank. There isn't any important institution that is looking at this globally, that isn't putting now the statistics together. I didn’t make them up. But they don’t seem to have seeped down into the consciousness of people, particularly in the global north and I think maybe it is because we are first of all we don’t want to have to be challenged that the economic system we have adopted in the north, which is competition, more growth, more exports, more stuff that that has to be challenged and so we just have to find a way around it. Oil and water, we are running out of both and we don’t want to deal with it. I also think there is a kind of hubris that we have in the global north, which is if you run out something, somebody can import it or somebody will make it up or somebody will find it. You just don’t have to cut down on your use of water because somehow, somebody will figure it out. Some technology will come along. Well, maybe, maybe not. This is what you need for life. You won't live more than three days without water. We all better start thinking about this. Recorded On: 3/17/08