[Sdpg] Blue Covenant: Maude Barlow on the Global Movement for Water Justice, Radio interview and transcript

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

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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