Maude Barlow - Whose Water Is It, Anyway?

MAUDE BARLOW

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Toni Morrison

This is a book about hope.

It is a story about everyday people defending the water resources of their communities and protecting the broader human right to water by ensuring it is now and forever a public trust, one that must not be allowed to fall under private, for-profit control.

It is a story about a grassroots campaign to address the water crisis the world is facing, which counters the argument that the best way to address this crisis is to commodify water and let the market decide who gets access to it and how.

But it is not a story about navet. It faces head-on some deeply disturbing realities we must acknowledge if we are to move forward.

In May 2016, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released the most comprehensive environmental study the United Nations has ever undertaken. Reporting on its studys findings, UNEP called water scarcity the scourge of the Earth and linked it directly to humanitys continued degradation of the lands and forests that replenish the worlds freshwater sources. In March 2018, UN Water released its annual World Water Development Report with a dire warning: if we do not change our ways, more than five billion people could suffer serious to severe water shortages in 30 years. Even today 3.6 billion people live in areas that are water scarce for at least a month per year. This could increase to as many as 5.7 billion people by 2050.

On top of these water shortages, there are many parts of the world where accessible, clean water is simply unavailable. An April 2017 report by the World Health Organization warned that at least two billion people worldwide drink water contaminated with feces every day, killing more than half a million people per year. WaterAid says that diarrhea caused by contaminated water and poor toilets kills a child under five every two minutes. The UN reports that 80% of wastewater from human activity is still discharged into waterways around the world without any pollution removal at all.

Some lay the blame for this at the feet of climate change. While it is true that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have affected the water cycle and natural water storage systems, it is equally true that our active, collective abuse of water is another major cause of the worlds growing water crisis. Not only are we changing the climate around us as we heat up the world, we are polluting, depleting, damming, overextracting and diverting the planets water systems. We are changing landscapes and local hydrologic cycles, creating deserts in some places and catastrophic floods in others. Communities already living without clean water because of poverty, inequality and discrimination now find themselves in further danger as local water sources dry up or are claimed for profit-related purposes.

Two populations are particularly affected by the global water crisis. In many places, women have the primary responsibility to provide water for their families and they must walk hours every day in their search. Often they bring along their girl children, who then miss school. Girls may also refuse to attend school if there are no proper and safe sanitation conditions. The United Nations reports that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, women collectively spend 200 million hours each day, or 40 billion hours a year, collecting water. In a world where more people have access to cell phones than toilets, women and girls living without a toilet collectively spend 266 million hours each day finding a place to go to the bathroom.

Indigenous Peoples around the world are also at extra risk from the water crisis. Often living in smaller and more remote communities, they have less collective power to stand up to large extractive industrial operations in their territories that damage their local water supplies. Along with peasants, many of them landless, and small rural farmers, Indigenous Peoples are the most marginalized and are particularly vulnerable to industrial pollution of their water sources and to a lack of proper sanitation. These factors, along with extreme poverty, deny them access to clean drinking water. This is not confined to the global South. Twice as many Native Americans live in poverty as the rest of the American population, and 7.5% of their homes do not have basic sanitation or safe drinking water. First Nations communities in Canada are 90% more likely not to have running water or toilets in their homes than the Canadian population in general.