The world’s water crisis will be front and centre on Capitol Hill in Washington tonight and tomorrow.
Maude Barlow will be part of a teach-in and rally happening as part of “Fire Drill Fridays.” The events, hosted by activist and actress Jane Fonda, are “inspired by Greta Thunberg and the youth climate strikes as well as Reverend Barber’s Moral Mondays and Randall Robinson’s often daily anti-apartheid protests.”
The teach-ins are being held to bring concerned citizens “closer to the epicenter of the fight for our climate” as people demand immediate and urgent action from their political representatives. Tonight’s teach-in will be live-streamed on Facebook at 7:00 p.m. EST. Tomorrow’s rally takes place on the Southeast Lawn starting at 11 a.m. EST.
Other speakers taking part include actresses Diane Lane and Piper Perabo, Garett Reppenhagen with Veterans for Peace, Mary Grant from the Public Water for All campaign, youth activist Alice Brown Otter, and more.
As explained on the Fire Drill Fridays website, “There will be many impacts of climate change, but among the most important are impacts on water resources. A colloquial way to say this is: If climate change is a shark, water resources are the teeth that will bite us. The key impacts will be changes in rain and snow, rising temperatures and hence rising demand for water, especially to grow food, worsening water quality, and worse extreme events including floods and droughts that overload systems built for more stable weather patterns.”
The website goes on to explain how we are already seeing – and in some cases living – the water crisis “These aren’t speculation – they are things we are already seeing all around the world. Given the enormous water problems the world already faces, including outdated water infrastructure, industrial contamination, disappearing groundwater, conflicts over water and lack of access to safe water for millions – climate change is a massive added threat.”
The event echoes the action Maude Barlow and other water activists around the world have been calling for. “The good news is that there are things we can do to address these challenges, but we need to stand together to demand stronger, faster action. We can start making progress by: 1) stopping the current attacks on regulations that protect water, and instead update and expand them, 2) stopping fossil fuel extraction, including fracking, that contaminates far too much of the precious fresh water we have and 3) invest in Green New Deal scale infrastructure projects that provide good union jobs to build the systems we need to adapt to a climate changed world and ensure clean safe water for all.”
