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CHAPTER 1
MAUDE BARLOW
Maude Barlow is national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and former senior adviser on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly. She chairs the board of the Washington-based Food & Water Watch and is a counselor to the Hamburg-based World Future Council. Maude is a recipient of eleven honorary doctorates, the 2005 Bright Light Award, and the 2008 Canadian Environment Award. She is the author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for Water.
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Helen Caldicott: You're in Australia at the moment, and you're Canadian, so you've come to help us with our water, right?
Maude Barlow: I'm not here to say how wonderful Canada is at handling our water. If I'm critical about what Australia is doing, I'm critical about my own country as well. The only difference is that we have more water to be cavalier about.
HC: Let's look at the world water situation in terms of global warming, sea-level rise, people in Bangladesh and their wells becoming salty, and the like.
MB: The big story is that the world's running out of freshwater. In about grade six we all learned that there's a finite, fixed amount of water, and it goes around and around in the hydrological cycle and can't go anywhere. But that's not true, it turns out. A combination of polluting surface water and overmining groundwater and extracting our rivers to death takes water from where it's needed, not only for a healthy ecosystem and for the actual hydrological cycle to function, but also, for instance, in cities; when we're finished with it we dump it into the ocean, but we don't return it to the land. As a result, we are creating what scientists call hot stains. These are parts of the world that are actually physically drying up. These are not cyclical droughts but rather growing deserts.
One is northern China. China uses its water to produce many of the toys and running shoes for the world, so it is removing water from its watersheds for industry. China is creating an area of desert the size of Rhode Island every year. India has 23 million bore wells going 24/7 just pumping water out of the ground. Chile, big parts of southern Europe, around the Mediterranean and other points, all are in trouble. Mexico City is sinking on itself. They've taken all the water from under the ground. There are twenty-two countries in Africa in crisis, and every one of their 677 lakes is in crisis. The Southwest of the United States is in crisis, as is the Colorado River, which is declining. I would argue that Australia is one of these places that has built an economic miracle on the notion that there were unlimited resources. It's not true. Close to a billion people live in water-stressed regions of the world. Close to 3 billion have no running water within a kilometer [about a half mile] of their homes. And every eight seconds, somewhere in our world a child is dying of a waterborne disease, because the number-one cause of mortality, more than HIV/AIDS, accidents, and war put together, is dirty water. So I feel that the global water crisis is the number-one ecological and human crisis of our time. Our governments continue to deny the problem and have these great hopes that somehow big technology will save us.
HC: What about overpopulation? What role does that play in water shortage?
MB: Well, it's huge. But it's not population by itself; it is population plus a certain kind of development — Western, urbanized, consumer-based. As our populations increased threefold, since the 1950s, our water use has increased sevenfold. And I've been in communities in, say, rural India, where there are very dense populations per square kilometer [about a third of a square mile], but they live the way their great-great-grandparents lived, and they take care of the water. They don't pollute and they don't waste it. In countries like India and China, we physically are using more water than we have. The statistics are so stunning; looking ahead at 2025, 2035, 2050, no one knows where the water that we will need is going to come from, and there's no way yet to manufacture new sources of water.
HC: Politicians in Australia are talking about desalination plants. We're either called to produce more energy, which aggravates global warming, or build nuclear power plants to desalinate water.
MB: There's a true belief here that these private markets and the "three Ds" — dams, desalination, and diversion — are an economic miracle. It's a myth. As you say, desalination is very energy intensive, and it gives off CO pollution. There are exorbitant expenses. It's important that we stop and remember that we're handing off to some parts of the environment what we don't want to continue to create in another part. Biofuel cuts down on fossil fuel for our cars, but we use land and water to grow food to feed those cars. We're creating problems with water to solve fossil fuel issues. With desalination you are abusing the ocean to provide water. Desal plants release a very intense brine back into the ocean. So there's the combination of the intense salt that gets stuck behind, the chemical that's used for the reverse osmosis process, and then this aquatic brine that is sucked in and sucked back out. I've been hearing from technicians who say, "We're just going to build a pipeline and send it farther out into the ocean."
HC: They always say that.
MB: And then it will kill the ocean a little farther out. The notion that the oceans are here for us to abuse is really a dangerous one. There are a number of new books, one by a terrific Canadian author, Alana Mitchell, called Sea Sick. What we're doing to the ocean is criminal, with the used plastic and the overfishing that's going on.
HC: What used plastic? Gyres?
MB: Yes, the great big whirlpools of plastic in the ocean that won't stop growing.
HC: There's a collection of plastic in the North Pacific. How large is it?
MB: The size of Mexico. The plastic breaks down, and then it gets into all the animals, the aquatic life. We really have to stop thinking of the ocean as the place where we can dump the problems that we haven't learned to live with on Earth. For me, desalination is what you do when you have run out of every single other answer. There's actually a place now, Salisbury, a suburb of Adelaide, where they're collecting the storm water and the human waste and recycling it through natural systems. They show that the city of Adelaide could provide water for its needs using this method at far less cost than their desalination plant. But they refuse to go to the natural model. We humans somehow think building these new technologies will take care of things. It's a very expensive mistake.
HC: I used to live in Adelaide, and we all used to have water tanks to collect the rainwater from the roof. I now live in a small fishing village, and I rely upon rainwater. And it should be imperative in a time of crisis that every single household on earth has a rainwater tank, and when it rains you collect the water from your roof.
MB: I absolutely agree with you. But we have come so far from that. Where does water come from? It comes from the tap or it comes from a bottle at Walmart. We don't have a relationship with water that says, This water must be returned to the land. It must be returned to the rivers and the aquifers. We've got to build our solutions on agreed-upon principles. And if we don't get those principles right, we're going to get the answers wrong.
HC: What principles would you follow?
MB: There are five I would suggest for Australia. The first is that the national government might declare Australia's water to be a public trust. Now I understand under the constitution in Australia water does belong to the people in the states; but this principle has been compromised under the 1994 law that allowed the opening of water trading between private brokers and the sellers. That's the privatization of the Murray-Darling river system, the irrigators who got the water for free using public money, to grow food; now they own that water from this 1994 legislation, and now they are saying to the government, "Well, maybe we'll sell it back to you, maybe we won't."
HC: I've never heard anything so ridiculous.
MB: The government needs to say, That water does not belong to you, it never belonged to you, and it's only for you to grow food. That doesn't mean that there isn't a commercial use for water, but we need to regulate it. The first thing to do is the reappropriation of public water. The federal government has to say, Water belongs to all Australians, the ecosystem, and the future. Period. Stop. The next principle is watershed protection and restoration. If we don't let enough water back into these water systems like the Murray-Darling system, we won't have enough water. We'll be refugees here.
HC: The Murray-Darling river system goes from the north of Australia and Queensland through New South Wales, through Victoria, to South Australia. It's the only river system we have in Australia, and Australia is the size of the United States, so you can imagine how precious that is.
MB: The Murray-Darling is where most of the agriculture in Australia takes place and where much of the food is grown.
The third principle would be conservation. Conservation is the soft path, as opposed to the hard path of technology. It's a different form of food production, more local, more sustainable. You pass a law so that you have a very strict code of conservation — collecting the storm water, the gray water, new building codes, all of that. The next principle is fair allocation. We have got to create a world built on the notion of water justice. And that means no one should be denied water because they cannot afford it. We have to say that water for living comes first, and local sustainable food production comes before commercial use. I tell people about the state of Vermont, where they have a lot of good groundwater, and water companies were coming in and pumping it up and sending it to cities in California. They passed a law saying that water belongs to the people in Vermont; it's their aquifer system and their future. If you use more than a certain amount a day, you have to have it licensed. And we have the right to revoke that if we feel your use is unsustainable. So the control is always back to the people, through their government.
The last principle is one we're working very hard on at the United Nations, and that is that water is a human right. I just came from Istanbul, and the World Water Forum says it's a need, which means that the private sector can deliver it on a for-profit basis. If somebody has been helping himself or herself to water for profit, then there's somebody else being denied that water. We need to establish once and for all that water is not running shoes, water is not Coca-Cola, water is what you need for life. And no one should be denied water from an inability to pay for it. We're hoping the nation-state constitutions will be amended to reflect this. We want a full covenant or treaty at the UN saying once and for all that water is a human right.
HC: I'm always shocked when I hear that corporations are moving into countries and saying, "We own the water, and you've got to buy it from us."
MB: In the global South the World Bank and the Regional Development Bank have promoted water privatization very strongly. For about fifteen years now the World Bank has extended money for water services in the global South contingent upon accepting private companies. Usually it's one of the two biggest companies, Suez and Veolia, who've run the water systems in France for many years, and who are about to lose their contracts for the first time in the city of Paris, which is about to go public. Everybody's very excited.
Suez and Veolia are all over the global South and in parts of the global North, delivering water on a for-profit basis, to people who can afford it. They have to take the same amount of public money that the public sector uses, but they have to profit from it, for their shareholders. Generally they lay off workers, and in some cases they triple the rate charged for water. There is a ferocious fight taking place all around the world, from La Paz, Bolivia, to Argentina, both of which kicked Suez out, to Atlanta, Georgia, which two years into a twenty-year contract said, Get out, don't come back. We can't believe what you did to our water system. But governments bought into the notion that the private sector can always do it better, especially in municipalities that are cash strapped. There's a fierce battle in the global South around this issue of the right to water.
HC: This is obscene, Maude, that the World Bank, which was set up to help developing countries and those of the third world, actually supports private companies who totally exploit the natural resources in the third world.
MB: It's a disaster. Even the UN under Kofi Annan supported privatization projects.
HC: Did he really? Why?
MB: I think that he really felt that playing with the big boys meant playing with the World Bank and the IMF. It was under Kofi Annan that the UN created the Global Compact, which is a voluntary agreement between the United Nations and a bunch of big corporations, some of whom are environmental and human rights abusers. Many of these companies have wrapped themselves in the UN flag. There's one for just the water companies, called the CEO Water Mandate, and it's all the big bottled water companies, all the utility companies. As somebody who's advising the president of the UN General Assembly, I criticize this corporate involvement in the one international institution left that has not been taken over by corporate interests. It's a very serious problem.
HC: They're being bought off. What happens to the poor people in these countries? How can they afford water?
MB: They can't. In Johannesburg, South Africa, Suez came in, and they bring water into the townships, but they installed prepaid water meters. And I remember standing in one of the townships with burning tires and garbage and what you call "flying toilets" where they defecate into plastic bags and just throw them. You can imagine this place when it rains. Then they suddenly have water coming into these communities, one of these pipes per block. But between the pipe and the tap is a water meter. You charge up your electronic key and then you touch this water meter that counts every drop. When you're talking 85 percent unemployment in a community like that, people laugh. Well, laugh and cry. And then they take their buckets, and they walk five kilometers [three miles] to a river that has cholera-warning signs on it, and they carry it back for drinking water. Or they buy water from private vendors at many more times the amount than they would have had to pay had they been able to hook up to the system. But they can't.
HC: Why don't they break the meters?
MB: They do. And what I love is that, in South Africa, some of the municipal South African water workers install the meters during the day and come back at night and show the people how to do that. It's one of my favorite stories.
HC: All this privatization of water. Soon we'll be walking around with oxygen bottles on our back, and they'll privatize the air.
MB: You know, in a way, carbon-emission trading is exactly privatizing the air. The whole notion of being able to buy your way out of polluting is a form of privatization of the air. I've just written a report called "Our Water Commons" about how to take back this notion of the commons, which was very much a part of thinking in many communities around the world. The modern enclosure of the commons has been privatization of these areas that we thought were sacred. I would include health care.
HC: Certainly in America.
MB: And education certainly needs to be seen as part of the commons. But there's nothing you can point to that more urgently needs to be designated as part of the commons than water. Bottled water is really one of the ways that we start the privatization process. Because if we've decided we're not going to trust that tap water, and you're only going to go to bottled water, then you're not going to care what comes out of that tap, and therefore you're maybe not going to want to pay taxes to make sure that that tap water's clean or that the infrastructure was upgraded or that the source was protected, because you've lost faith in it.
HC: You don't know where the bottled water's coming from.
MB: There are so many studies that tell us that bottled water is probably not as safe as tap water in many places. We had a big scandal in Canada, when it was admitted by the food protection agency that they haven't inspected the bottled-water plants in over six years. It's completely left up to the industry to regulate.
HC: Think of Coors beer, next to the Rocky Flats plutonium production plant where there was a huge fire. People have no idea where this water comes from.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Loving This Planet"
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Copyright © 2012 Helen Caldicott.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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