Barlow in still from Russian River documentary.
The Russian River is a 177 kilometre river that flows from Mendocino County in northern California southward to not far from the San Francisco Bay’s Golden Gate bridge.
A new documentary The Russian River: All Rivers – The Value of an American Watershed, according to the filmmakers, “examines how the Russian River has been used, and what the consequences of that use have been. By looking at the effects of mining, logging, fishing, agriculture, diversion and development, the film conveys a historical perspective for the river’s condition.”
The Sonoma County Gazette reports that the film includes, “Maude Barlow, a Canadian activist and author who worked on water issues for the United Nations. Barlow nearly steals the show when she complains that corporations treat water in much the same way that they treat oil and gas: as a resource to be sucked out of the ground and sold on the open market. Water has rights, she insists, just as human beings have rights.”
In the trailer for the film, Barlow says, “The watershed is the ecosystem, this is the element that gives us life. And everything we do from urban planning to trade agreements and how we design them to economic policy to social policy, everything we do should be based around the protection of these watersheds and should be first and foremost. If we don’t get it now, we’re going to get it, believe me, trust me, we’re going to get it in ten years when we start to literally physically run out.”
Their website notes, “[In making this film, William Sorensen, Stella Kwiecinski and Nancy Econome] soon discovered how difficult it was for residents within the watershed to find accessible information and how little had been done to share it. They found, while efforts were being made to map and understand the watershed’s limits, the results might come too late. [In their interviews, they discovered] from experts and other concerned citizens that the bounty the watershed offered had become so valuable, so contested, that its very nature had become obscured by controversy and complexity, natural and manufactured.”
The filmmakers say they “hope that people living in watersheds everywhere record and document what’s happening where they live…to do whatever they can to protect and sustain these wondrous resources, and by doing, ensure their own health and survival.”
The Council of Canadians is committed to this type of action. To draw attention to the Harper government removing protections from 99 per cent of the lakes and rivers in Canada by amending the Navigable Waters Protection Act at the behest of the pipeline industry, we have asked people to take a photo of their waterway with a sign that says, “We pledge to protect [this waterway] because Harper’s budget bill leaves it unprotected under the Navigable Waters Protection Act” or a similar message. Some of those photos can be seen here.
For more about the film, please see its Facebook page here.
