Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water
Justice Radio interview and transcript
Listen to interview
with Amy Goodman Democracy Now Feb 27
www.democracynow.org/2008/2/27/maude_barlow_on_the_global_movement
Maude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s
largest public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet
Project. Barlow is author of the new book Blue Covenant: The Global
Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Guest:
Maude Barlow, Head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest
public advocacy organization, and founder of the Blue Planet Project. She
is the author of sixteen books, including Blue Gold. Her latest is
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the
Right to Water. She is a recipient of Sweden’s Right Livelihood
Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel.”
AMY GOODMAN: Eight of the nation’s largest water providers from
California to New York have announced the formation of a coalition to
develop strategies on dealing with climate change. The members of the
newly formed Water Utility Climate Alliance together provide water to
more than thirty-six million people in the United States. The group has
developed a list of goals that include expanding climate change research,
developing strategies for adapting to climate change and identifying
greenhouse gas emissions from individual operations.
Today, we’re going to spend the rest of the hour looking at the global
water crisis. Flow: For Love of Water
http://www.flowthefilm.com/ is a new documentary screened here in New
York last night. The film examines how the world’s water supplies are
diminishing and how the privatization of water is worsening the crisis.
PETER H. GLEICK: For the longest time, people have taken water for
granted. Most people don’t think about where their water comes from. They
just turn on the tap, and they expect it to be there. Those days are
ending.
MAUDE BARLOW: 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.
PETER H. GLEICK: 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.
MAUDE BARLOW: 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.
PATRICK McCULLY: We’re treating the water resources of the planet
with contempt, which is just so stupid, because we depend on them. We
need water to live. We will only survive for a day or two if we don’t
have water.
WILLIAM E. MARKS: Scientists, through decades of study and
millions and millions of pieces of data, now recognize the fact that
we’re on the brink of the sixth great mass extinction ever to be
experienced on the face of the earth. The fifth mass extinction was the
dinosaur age.
MAUDE BARLOW: 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 notour 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.
PETER H. GLEICK: Climate change is a real problem. Humans are
changing the climate. We already see evidence about it. One of the most
significant impacts of climate change will be on our water resources.
PATRICK McCULLY: We’re going to see a lot of people are going die
because of the floods and droughts and various social upheavals that are
caused by global warming. What’s also tragic is that there’s a lot of
awareness of that now, but so much of that awareness is then being used
by corporate interests. Oh, we’re running out of water, and we need to
invest so much money in water, and it’s so terrible how water is managed.
And then, somehow they make the flip to: oh, we must privatize it, so
then we’ll use it more efficiently and everybody will be better offwhich
is total nonsense, total amount of nonsense. It means merely that these
people have an interest clearly in making money or to selling water to
people.
MAUDE BARLOW: There are private corporate interests that have
decided that water is going to be put on the open market for sale. It’s
going to be commodified and treated as any other saleable good.
REPORTER: Water is now a $400 billion global industry, the third
largest behind electricity and oil.
WATER EXECUTIVE: I bought the green. I had the blue. And I have
about half of the yellow.
MAUDE BARLOW: The market is amoral, and it’s going to lead you to
taking advantage of pollution and scarcity, frankly. It’s going to lead
you to selling it to those who can buy it but not to those who need it.
ROD PARSLEY: 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.
BOONE PICKENS: People say that, well, water is a lot like air. Do
you charge for air? Of course not. You shouldn’t charge for water. Well,
OK, watch what happens.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the documentary
Flowthat’s F-L-O-WFor Love of Water by filmmaker Irena
Salina. The documentary features one of the leading figures in the global
water justice movement, Maude Barlow. She is the head of the Council of
Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy group, founder of the Blue
Planet Project. Maude Barlow is author of sixteen booksher latest just
came out; it’s called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the
Coming Battle for the Right to Waterjoining us now in our firehouse
studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
MAUDE BARLOW: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the crisis. Where has all the water gone?
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, I guess the most important thing I want to put
out to the world is that we always hear that climate changeand that is,
greenhouse gas-induced climate changeis affecting water, which is
truemelting glaciers and all of that. But I am, with this book, trying
to put a new wrinkle, if you will, into the whole debate. It’s kind ofI
call it the inconvenient truth of water. And that is that our abuse,
pollution, misplacement, displacement and just mismanagement of water is
actually one of the causes of climate change. And it’s a really different
kind of way of looking at it.
Very simply, Amy, the story is that as we have polluted the world’s
surface water, we are taking water from the ground, from ground water or
from wilderness or from watersheds, and we’re moving it where we want it
to be, so to water great big huge cities that then dump it into the
ocean, so don’t return it to the watershed, or we pave over what’s called
water-retentive lands, so we don’t have the hydrologic cycle able to
fulfill its responsibility and bring water back. We’re doing something
called virtual water trade, which is where we use our water to grow or
produce something that then is exported. In the United States, you export
a third of your water, domestic water, every day out of the United States
in terms of these exports. You don’t have enough water to do that. And
AMY GOODMAN: Who exports it?
MAUDE BARLOW: Mainly large agribusiness. It’s mainly commodities
and corporations that are using this water towell, to export massive
amounts of commodities. But all sorts of countries are doing it.
Australia is doing it. Australia has hit the water wall, and Australia is
absolutely in crisis right now, and they’re still exporting massive
amounts of water through virtual water, say, to China. So the question is
herewe all learned somewhere back in school that it’s impossible for us
to interrupt the hydrologic cycle. Not true. The hydrologic cycle has
been dramatically and deeply affected by our abuse and displacement of
water, and we have to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain who the corporations are and how they get
their hands on this water. In the film and in your book, you talk about
this. I mean, there’s the struggle in Michigan. There’s the companies in
California that get the water for freeexplain how it happensand sell it
for
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, basically, if there was lots of water, it
wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if some people were getting wealthy from it.
But the fact is that we’re living in a world of diminishing water. We’re
actually running out. And I want to make this point so clearly. And
you’re running out in many parts of the United States. It is not cyclical
drought. This is the end of water in many parts of the world unless we
change our behavior.
Just last week, there was a report that came out that Lake Mead may not
be gone in thirteen years. This is the big backup system for Las Vegas
and Phoenix. I mean, this is crisis. The Colorado is in “catastrophic
decline”is the language of one scientist. And we need to understand this
isn’t cyclical drought.
So if this is the caseand it is the casethen the question of who owns
and controls water is very important. Who’s going to make the decisions
around water in the future? And what’s happened is that a large number
corporations are now coming into the field sayingactually creating a
kind of global water cartel, just as there exists for energy now, a
cartel of corporations that control every drop of oil before it’s taken
out of the ground. These companies are either big utility companies, like
Veolia and Suez from Europe, that run municipal water systems on a
for-profit system, and in the third world they deny millions of people
who can’t afford it.
There’s also bottled water. We put something like fifty billion gallons
of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, dumping those
bottles everywhere.
AMY GOODMAN: That they’re not biodegradable.
MAUDE BARLOW: Mostly not biodegradable. About 95 percent of them
don’t get recycled. But the newest corporate player on the block is the
whole water reuse and recycling industry. And this isthe biggest water
company in the world is probably General Electric now. Who knew, right?
Dow Chemical
AMY GOODMAN: General Electric, which owns NBC.
MAUDE BARLOW: Which ownsyes.
AMY GOODMAN: Among many other companies.
MAUDE BARLOW: And is now getting heavy-duty into the water
recycling industry. Now, let me be very clear, there’s a very important
place for water recycling, of course. And we’ve got to
AMY GOODMAN: What is water recycling?
MAUDE BARLOW: Water recycling is either toilet-to-tap recycling of
water or there’s nowor desalination. There’s many forms water recycling,
and it’s the big industry. It’s the fastest-growing part of the water
industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.
And my concernand the more research I did on this, the more concerned I
gotwas that this government, in particular, the United States, but many
governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning
up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at
its source. What they’re coming atthe way they’re coming at it now is to
clean up water after it’s been polluted. And there’s huge amounts of
money to be made. And my concern is, who’s going to control that? Who’s
going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola can own the water it sells
you, why wouldn’t General Electric or Suez be able to say, “Well, we own
the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make,
and we will decide how muchwho gets it and who’s not going to get it”?
So it’s very much an issue of control, and also control about regulation
at the other end.
One of the things, Amy, that I found that really kind of surprised me,
because I wrote another book called Blue Gold six years ago, and
at the time there was no recognition at the federal level in this country
that this country was in a kind of crisis around water. Water now has
moved right up to the top of the agenda, in terms of a national security
issue. The United States is as worried about water as it is about energy
and finding new and secure sources of water from around the world.
And this is also true for China. China is on the search for water. It’s
destroyed its water table, so that all the running shoes and toys in the
world, and so on, are come from there, so they’ve diverted their water
from watersheds and from growing green for their people to production.
And so, now they’re going to build a great big pipeline up to the Tibetan
Himalayas. They’re going to take the water that belongs to the rivers
that feed all of Asia. So if you want to see a water war coming, you keep
your eye on that one.
But I think, similarly, the United States, it’s very clear, is looking to
Canada, is looking to the Guarani Aquifer in Latin America around water
sources. It’s looking to secure water as a national security issue, just
like energy, because you can’t be a superpower and be running out of
these essential resources. Soexcuse me, this is an old cold. So,
suddenly, water has just become a huge issue.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maude Barlow. Her latest book is
called Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle
for the Right to Water. So you’re describing the water hunters. You
also talk about the water warriors.
MAUDE BARLOW: Yes. It’s a term we use to describe the global water
justice movement, and it’s a fabulous movement. We work with people in
the Global South, we work with communities across North America and
Europe, people who are fighting for local control of their water, either
against a local bottled water company like in Fryeburg, Maine, or in
Mount Shasta in California, where these big companies come in and take
away the local water, or India, where Coca-Cola has just been kicked out
of several communities. We work around the world for people who are
fighting against the big water transnationals who are coming in and
running their water on a for-profit system and putting in meters into
people’s homesor, you know, these slums, generallyand telling people
that they have to pay. And we’ve had a tremendous success. We really have
created a global water justice movement that has taken off.
And right now, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the
World Water Council, which has set itself upI call it the Lords of
Waterare all on the defensive and understanding and admitting that their
program of privatization has been a massive failure. And now we’re saying
governments have to come back into the picture. We have to have public
control, public transparency and public accountability.
AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, I want to play another excerpt of the
documentary Flow: For Love of Water, where the film takes us to
this issue of bottled water.
ERIK D. OLSON: Bottled water is used by millions of people around
the world, because they think it’s safer than tap water. There is less
than one person, according to the Food and Drug Administration,
regulating the entire multibillion-dollar bottled water industry in the
United States. That means that that poor person does multiple things, and
one of them is water. The Food and Drug Administration, if you ask them
what’s in any brand of bottled water, they’ll say, “We have no idea.”
PENN GILLETTE: It’s so stupid. Why would people pay such a premium
for bottled water? To find out, we took over a very trendy California
restaurant. We printed our own elegant water menus with phony imported
waters costing as much as $7 per bottle. Our water steward gives our
first lucky couple our special water list.
CUSTOMER 1: I guess we’ll get the l’eau du robinet.
WATER STEWARD: The l’eau du robinet?
CUSTOMER 1: Yeah.
WATER STEWARD: Oh, fantastic!
PENN GILLETTE: It’s French for “tap water.”
CUSTOMER 1: Cheers! Yeah, it tastes clean.
CUSTOMER 2: It has a flavor to it.
WATER STEWARD: How would you compare it to tap water?
CUSTOMER 2: Oh, yeah, definitely better than tap water.
PENN GILLETTE: What was the actual source of these chic waters? A
garden hose on the restaurant patio.
LEE JORDAN: Three-out-of-four Americans drink bottled water, and
one-in-five will only drink bottled water. And water is something we
already pay for.
UNIDENTIFIED: Leading brands are basically tap water, often sold
for more than the cost of gasoline.
GIGI KELLETT: So today we’re here at Tufts University, organizing
our forty-second tap water challenge.
CHALLENGER: I thought for sure that the Dasani water was tap
water.
GIGI KELLETT: They’re spending tens of millions of dollars every
year to convince us that bottled water is better than tap water, when, in
fact, it’s much less regulated.
ERIK D. OLSON: 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.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the new documentary Flow: For
Love of Water. Its director is Irena Salina, and its producer is
Steven Starr. Maude Barlow, you’re the chair of the board of Food and
Water Watch. In this last thirty seconds, what are you doing with it?
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, we’re pushing here in the United States for a
trust fund for infrastructure. The sewage disposal system in the United
States, as in many countries, is in a mess. We’re pushingwe have a
“Think Outside the Bottle” or “Take Back the Tap” campaign for bottled
water. We’re getting restaurants to agree not to serve bottled water. And
we’re fighting the desalination plants, particularly in California,
because it’s a bad technology, it’s an admission of failure. And we can
do much more with conservation and caring for source water.
AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow’s new book is called Blue Covenant:
The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
Thanks for joining us.
MAUDE BARLOW: Thanks for having me.
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