BRIGADE ARTICLES

A Look Into the Water Crisis

"There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people - and the environment - suffer badly."  World Water Vision Report

We Americans often don’t think about where water comes from; we basically turn on the faucet and the water is there. There is a huge movement, as many of you may know, to increase our awareness in the potential water crisis. Experts have been warning us that water, our most valuable resource, is in jeopardy of becoming the most fought over and depleted resource on our planet.

Maude Barlow, head of the World Water Council and one of the most influential activists on the water crisis, quoted on Democracy Now, “This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got twenty-some years of water. New Mexico has got ten, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five. Arizona, Florida, even the Great Lakes now, there’s huge new demand. The Nile River doesn’t reach its end. The Colorado River, the Yellow River in China, they, for the most part, don’t flow anymore to the sea. So this notion that somehow these problems are far away, get rid of that. You know, take it out of your head. You know, delete that.”

Maude Barlow has even quoted, “You know those movies where there’s the comet coming at the earth, and all of a sudden the governments of the world say, “Gee, we’re not—our differences aren’t so big anymore, because we’re about to all die”? That’s really where we are. There is a comet coming at us. It’s called water shortage.”

In my opinion, there are five critical issues wrapped around the water crisis.

1. We are draining our water resources. We take water from the ground and watersheds and move it to where we want it to be. Then, we send it off to the ocean instead of returning it to the watershed. Our actions disrupt and halt the hydrological cycle from fulfilling its role to bring the water back. We do this by routing water to cities, and we also do this by using water to produce export goods. Yes this sounds farfetched, but the United States exports a third of it’s water every day in terms of exports (Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, Maude Barlow). This accounts for the agribusinesses that use the water to export food and mainly the massive amount of water used to produce export commodities.

It takes a great deal of water to manufacture our goods:
· 1 newspaper takes 150 gallon
· 1 liter of orange juice takes 1000 gallons
· 1 pound of beef takes 2500 gallons
· 1 new car takes 40,000 gallons

www.waterdoc.org, Hart Productions Inc, 2005

Our water depletion is piggybacked by the component of pollution. As we deplete our resources, our reserve is also being sacrificed by contaminants. I believe it is true we have polluted most of the surface water on the planet.

2. The impact of water on our planet through climate change could be disastrous. Scientists predict major floods and droughts all over the world. Upheaval, deaths, the whole spectrum is predicted and yet our actions today are not countering this potential threat. There is so much we could do NOW to prevent the climate changes from accelerating in the ways we utilize and value water. The predictions of scientist say many parts on our planet will not have water. Imagine a city or a region displaced from a permanent drought? How would our culture take care of this? What resources would be there to help?

3. There is a gigantic corporate agenda to make water a corporately owned product. Privatized water means people have an interest in making money or to sell water. And I strongly believe that water is free and should always be free, just like air. And yet, corporate interests realize we are running out of water. Cashing on a limited resource is big business at its finest. Expert Rod Parsley quotes, “The water sector is going to grow two to three times the global economy over the next twenty years. By buying the companies that source, treat, distribute and monitor our water supply, you’re likely to have a pretty strong investment over the next decade or so.” The global water cartel will control every drop of water before it’s taken out of the ground. Barlow suggests in her book that these companies will be big utility companies that run municipal water systems on a for-profit system. What this really means is that people who can afford it will get water, and the people who need it won’t.

4. Bottled water is a corporate industry commodity that produces a bunch of trash. Water bottles are polluting our earth, not to mention the energy and resources zapped for their production.  And, most importantly it stems from the giant farce that the water is actually purified and regulated.

Only five percent of water bottles get recycled. FIVE PERCENT! Where do the other 95% go, down the drain and into the ocean or put into our land. The ocean scenario is so much worse with the after effects of plastic amidst the life of the sea. Birds such as the albatrosses die in mass numbers due to plastic shards in their rib cages. And there was recently a report in the Santa Cruz Good Times about the 3.5 million tons of plastic garbage floating in a subtropical gyre in the North Pacific Ocean. The area is a convergence of four ocean currents, with unique weather patterns and high pressure that lead to a dead spot in the middle of the sea. The pollution is twice the size of the United States. It is not a big mound but a thick noodly soup of trash reaching 300 feet down. One of the most distinguishable traits of the soup is the plastic bottles.

There is so much we could do to take water out of the single serving mentality. Preparation and commitment, using jugs and reusable containers, installing home water purification systems and convincing the corporate sector to bring back the water fountain would make huge impacts when we globally participate. However, the preface of buying processed water because our water is unsafe is often wrong. Much of the tap water used in the United States is healthy and safe. We are privileged to have access to healthy water. And to top it all off, the water we buy because of affluence and health values is often tap water that is packaged with commercial greed. In the Democracy Now piece on the water crisis last month, Amy Goodman previewed a snippet of the documentary, Flow: For Love of Water:

“We tested over a thousand bottles of water, over a hundred brands that are sold in the United States, and we found that it is not necessarily any safer or better or purer than your city tap water. We found some of them had arsenic in them at high levels; some of them had organic chemicals in them, a variety of bacteria. So there were problems with about a third of the brands that we sampled. Some of the water we saw had pictures of mountains on it; it was city tap water. Glacier water came from groundwater in Florida. Some of them said that they were pure mountain. I mean, the list is very long. We found a case in Massachusetts where a guy had sunk a well in an industrial parking lot that was near a superfund site. He was pumping water out of this well and selling it under multiple different brands. So people buying this stuff had no idea where it was coming from.”

5. Superpowers, such as the United States and China, are using force to own and monopolize water resources outside of their nation. Barlow reports in her book that China has destroyed its water table and is diverting their water from watersheds and from growing food for their people to using it for production. They are also building a giant pipeline from the Tibetan Himalayas, which feeds all of the rivers of Asia. United States is investigating aquifers in Latin America and Canada. The complexities of this are overwhelming. It brings to mind: potential wars, droughts, huge wastes of energy, resources lost in importing, those in poverty losing even more and global dominance by the rich.

There are a few good ways to get caught up to speed on this very important topic.
· Read one of Maude Barlow’s dozen books about the issue, including her latest book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
· Watch the new documentary, Flow: For Love of Water, directed by Irena Salina.
· Check out the political group World Water Council. Their website is a megahouse of information, events, history and resources at www.worldwatercouncil.org.

Article Submitted by Erin McDaniel from Oakland, California