World views collide over water crisis

By Kathleen O'Hara
The Toronto Star
November 22, 2007

Exceptionally dedicated people like Council of Canadians chair Maude Barlow overwhelm me. Their presence leaves me feeling quite ineffectual. Such was my reaction when I bumped into Barlow in London, England, at a conference called Be The Change, based on Mahatma Gandhi's observation "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Barlow joined other prominent speakers in outlining for several hundred people the reasons why the world as it is simply can't last. While most concentrated on climate change and dwindling fossil fuel reserves, Barlow shocked the room with her analysis of the "global water crisis."

Her speech was based on her latest book – her 17th – entitled: Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. When she handed me a signed copy, she explained that she was flying back to Canada the next morning to continue her cross-country book tour. Until then, there were more meetings.

I first met Barlow while we were trying to stop NAFTA in the early '90s. It was a disheartening struggle in what now seems a simpler, more innocent time. After that, she broadened her scope from saving Canada to saving the planet. Since you can't have the former without the latter, it was a natural progression. Her work has been widely recognized. She has even been awarded the Right Livelihood Award – the "alternative Nobel."

As for the book, she doesn't pull any punches – nor should she when dealing with the "imperilled" future of the world's most crucial resource. On my way home from the conference, people on my London bus must have wondered what I was reading as I underlined sentences and turned pages, lost in a frightening world of water shortages and confrontations, much of it based on Barlow's own travels "to every continent and into remote and often wretchedly poor communities around the globe."

The basis of the crisis is that the world is running out of clean water. In the developed world, lakes and rivers are shrinking, groundwater sources are dwindling and so-called droughts are more common. In the Third World, where 90 per cent of waste water is dumped untreated into rivers, streams and oceans, megacities are drying up their water tables, millions of farmers must drill deeper to access underground reserves, and a child dies every eight seconds from drinking dirty water.

There are two reactions to this crisis. On one side, large corporations with, as Barlow points out, the assistance of most First World governments, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and even the United Nations, are trying to promote the concept of water as a commodity, like oil, to be owned, sold and traded. "They have established an elaborate infrastructure to promote the private control of water, and they work in close tandem with one another."

On the other side, there are people who think that water is "the common heritage of all humans and other species, as well as a public trust that must not be appropriated for personal profit or denied to anyone because of an inability to pay." These people have formed "a large global water justice movement made up of environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous and women's groups, small farmers, peasants and thousands of grassroots communities." They want water to be declared a human right.

The book provides examples, including Canadian, of these two world views colliding, and there is no mystery where the author stands. Little wonder the dedication reads: "To all the water warriors. You amaze me."

Barlow amazes me.