Maude Barlow
"Water in the 21st Century"
Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 11:30 AM
One of Canada’s best known voices of dissent, Maude Barlow is creative, passionate, and influential. Over the years she’s fought on the feminist front, and struggled with the Canadian government over free-trade issues.Barlow is now the National Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest citizen’s advocacy organization, as well as the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, which works to stop commodification of the world’s water. Barlow is also a Director with the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco based research and education institution opposed to economic globalization.
The recipient of numerous educational awards, Barlow has also received honorary doctorates from six Canadian universities for her social justice work. In addition to being nominated for the “1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005” she is also the recipient of the “2005/2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.” Most recently she received the prestigious “2005 Right Livelihood Award” given by the Swedish Parliament and widely referred to as “The Alternative Nobel.”
Barlow is the best-selling author or co-author of fifteen books. Her most recent publications include Too Close For Comfort: Canada’s Future Within Fortress North America; Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water; and Profit is Not the Cure: A Citizens’ Guide to Saving Medicare.
Read an interview in MotherJones with Maude Barlow
LECTURE SUMMARY
One can easily picture Maude Barlow, outside the corporate headquarters of Coca Cola or Violia, all alone, bullhorn in hand, shouting to the executives on the 47th Floor, "Come out, I have you completely surrounded." Instead, on March 22, which happened to be World Water Day, she spoke to a more receptive crowd at the First Congregational Church in Portland.
Barlow was to be Illahee's Oil and Water Series first speaker to address water. But she started with oil, specifically the tar sands of Alberta, which, oddly enough are mostly committed to the United States through the strictures of NAFTA. Mining the tar sands and turning them into usable petroleum will require enormous amounts of water. What's left of northern Canada's water may very well be headed to the US as well, if the large pipelines being built up to Canada's border are any indication.
Barlow takes issue with peak oil crowd. It's not the end of oil. It's the end of cheap oil. And in her opinion, the coming world water crisis will be far more devastating. But everyone and their cousin is writing about oil. Water's a looming issue that threatens to catch us unprepared. Like oil, water is a class issue. When the shortages come, the rich will get it.
Actually the crisis has arrived, not here, but in the developing world. But water is a renewable resource, right? It cycles. The same water we're drinking once ran through the blood of dinosaurs, so what's the problem? First, only .05 percent of the world's water is useable. We've damaged much of the world's surface water, and now much of civilization is depleting ground water. The US relies on ground water for 50% of its supply and currently has 200,000 wells pumping the great Ogallala Aquifer 24/7 at fourteen times the rate of replenishment.
But the US and Canada are in pretty good shape compared to the rest of the world, where one can see "hot stains" with satellite imagery. All across developing countries from Africa to India to China, the world is in water crisis. Two thirds of cities in northern China are in severe drought. Much of Africa has been in water deficit for decades. Mexico City is draining its ground water so fast it is sinking in on itself. Even in the US, the Midwest is in a long-term drought that's not going away according to hydrologists. By 2025 two thirds of the world's people won't have adequate water supplies. One third will be desperate. Indigenous people are already "hunting and gathering" water when we could fix much of the world's water issues with reclamation and conservation. Instead water has become "Blue Gold."
Three huge multinational companies, Suez, Violia (just contracted to run parts of Canby's and Wilsonville's water systems) and RW, have become "water hunters" - searching for available free water and locking it up in long term leases, with the goal of supplying much of the developing world's water at exorbitant prices. Barlow tells harrowing stories of local people walking past high-tech water meters that deliver high-cost quality water, to gather up poisoned, but "free" water elsewhere. And often the metered water isn't high quality either.
Want an alternative to poisoned local water, or lousy expensive metered water? The large corporations can help you there, with bottled water, sold at 1100 times the cost of the original tap water (where most bottled water comes from!). It's a huge market with over 170 billion liters sold last year. Coca Cola, a major player in the bottled water market, already provides the world with ten percent of its TLI (total liquid intake) and they're aiming for 20% in the next decade!
It boils down to two visions: In the first, large corporations, the World Bank, and northern governments (organized as the World Water Council - a faux UN-like association) run the world's water supply, or much of it. Bottom line, the powerful get water at the expense of the weak. Cities take water unilaterally. Conflicts arise between corporate and local farms. Water becomes militarized.
In the second, an international civil society movement, comprising NGO's indigenous people, women, and local communities demand an answer to the question: who owns water? The answer they're looking for is: “No one. Water is a human right."
This movement has just started and already has momentum. Several countries (Uruguay and Bolivia) have booted multinationals, and cities such as Atlanta have given corporate water suppliers their pink slip. The civic society movement dogs the movers and shakers at the World Water Forum, and has grown so fast that just a few years into the effort they're now holding a large "Alternative Water Forum" along side the WWF.
This second vision results in that image we started with, Maude Barlow outside of corporate headquarters, alone with a bullhorn, in a kind of reverse-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scene. But this time, one can picture hundreds of corporate executives coming out with their hands up. Because Barlow won't be alone, she'll have hundreds of millions of people behind her.
