Hi Everyone. Pioneer here at the EENR desk to highlight another issue that progressives really care about - climate change and its impact on your life. I, in particular, have been getting more and more concerned about water and the coming droughts in various parts of the world and in the US. This issue is already upon us and yet we are not paying close attention.
Maude Barlow, author of Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water is a Canadian antiglobalization activist who is heading up the Blue Planet Project:
The Blue Planet Project is an international civil society movement begun by The Council of Canadians to protect the world’s fresh water from the growing threats of trade and privatization.
We work with organizations and activists in both South and North, and are affiliated with international networks including Friends of the Earth International, Red Vida (the Americas Network on the Right to Water) and the People’s Health Movement.
Maude Barlow presented a talk in Berkley CA on February 8, 2008 on this issue. Here is a short excerpt:
Maude Barlow on the Global Water Crisis, KPFA Events
A couple of facts she is providing in this talk:
1. The US is sending a third of its potable water out of the country as exports every single day.
2. 36 states are now in danger of serious water shortages in the next five years. Several have the problem now.
From Publisher's Weekly Review of Barlow's book Blue Covenant:
Barlow (Blue Gold) calls for a blue covenant among nations to define the world's fresh water as a human right and a public trust rather than a commercial product. Barlow marshals facts and figures with admirable (if often dry) comprehensiveness, noting that as many as 36 U.S. states could reach a water crisis in five years; that once vast freshwater resources like Lake Chad and the Aral Sea are becoming briny puddles; and a handful of multinational water companies, abetted by World Bank monetary policies and United Nations political timidity, are bidding for the complete commodification of formerly public water resources.
Her passionate plea for access-to-water activism is buttressed with some breakthroughs; Uruguay has enshrined public water rights in its constitution (the only nation to do so), and water warriors are fighting back in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, where activists have forced private water companies to cede control of municipal water systems. There's a noble tilting-at-windmills quality to the author's call for private citizens and nongovernmental organizations to challenge corporate control of water delivery, agitate for equitable access to clean water and confront the reality that freshwater supplies are dwindling.
In a 2002 article in the Nation Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke ask the question Who Owns Water? and then they point out:
This movement originates in a fight for survival. The world is running out of fresh water. Humanity is polluting, diverting and depleting the wellspring of life at a startling rate. With every passing day, our demand for fresh water outpaces its availability, and thousands more people are put at risk. Already, the social, political and economic impacts of water scarcity are rapidly becoming a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts springing up around the globe. Quite simply, unless we dramatically change our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe freshwater shortages within the next quarter-century.
They go on to say:
It seemed to sneak up on us, or at least those of us living in the North. Until the past decade, the study of fresh water was left to highly specialized groups of experts--hydrologists, engineers, scientists, city planners, weather forecasters and others with a niche interest in what so many of us took for granted. Many knew about the condition of water in the Third World, including the millions who die of waterborne diseases every year. But this was seen as an issue of poverty, poor sanitation and injustice--all areas that could be addressed in the just world for which we were fighting.
Now, however, an increasing number of voices--including human rights and environmental groups, think tanks and research organizations, official international agencies and thousands of community groups around the world--are sounding the alarm. The earth's fresh water is finite and small, representing less than one half of 1 percent of the world's total water stock.
Are we paying close enough attention?
What are the chances that Lake Mead, a key source of water for more than 22 million people in the Southwest, would ever go dry? A new study says it's 50 percent by 2021 if warming continues and water use is not curtailed.
"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us," co-author Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said in a statement. "Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest."
This view of Lake Mead was taken last July 26, during the seventh straight year of drought that had caused the lake to drop more than 100 feet to its lowest level since the late 1960s.
I was not as aware of the severity of the problem as I think I should be until very recently. I understood there were issues for Atlanta and for Phoenix but the problem is much more widespread than I thought.
For more information watch these two videos that are an interview with Maude Barlow. They are fascinating and alarming. What should we be doing about this issue? A question to consider.
The Wars of the Future will be fought over WATER!-1/2
The Wars of the Future will be fought over WATER!-2/2
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