By: Fazeela Jiwa
In her new book, Blue Future, Maude Barlow outlines two options for a world on the verge of a water crisis: either we kill each other in conflicts of scarcity, or we approach water sustainability as the primary strategy for peace-building and co-operation around the globe. Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and co-founder of The Blue Planet Project. OPIRG Roots Radio had the chance to speak with her ahead of Blue Future’s launch last Tuesday. Below are some excerpts from that conversation.
Roots Radio: In your book, Anansi Press says you “offer solutions to the global water crisis based on four simple principles.”
The first principle is “water is a human right” and this part of the book “chronicles the long fight to have the human right to water recognized and the powerful players still impeding this progress,” so I wanted to ask you a little bit about who those powerful players are and about that long fight.
Maude Barlow: People always say, “of course water is a human right.” But let me tell you, it took twenty years to get it recognized by the United Nations. Didn’t happen until three years ago. One of the leading voices against it was the Government of Canada, under the Harper regime. We should all be angry about that. I certainly am.
But it was also a lot of the big international institutions. The World Bank, for example, promotes privatization of water in the global South so they didn’t support it…a lot of first world governments opposed it because they don’t want an expansion of the concept of human rights. Certainly in Canada, our government doesn’t want to deal with the issue of the lack of clean water and sanitation in First Nations communities.
RR: In the second principle in your book, which is “water is a common heritage and public trust,” you’re talking about water not becoming a commodity. How is water being proposed as a commodity?
MB: This is a central debate about how to deal with the water crisis, because we live on a planet with dwindling accessible water supplies as the demand rises.
So what this principle says is that because water is necessary for life, because there is no other way to get it…we have to see it as a public trust. That is, that it is a common heritage of all humans, and other species, and of all future generations. We have to think of it as: we’re stewards of this water, and that we have to fiercely guard it.
RR: In principle three, you’re talking about the idea that “water has rights too.” What struck me is that you said we need to protect the source water but also that we “need to make our human laws compatible with those of nature.” What would that entail?
MB: Public trust still thinks about water belonging to us but only in a better, more equitable way. But I also wanted people to think about the notion that water has rights beyond its usefulness to humans. In our modern world, and in our modern Western law, water is seen as property. Most nature is seen as property. And this has led us to think of water as a resource for our pleasure, convenience and profit, and not as the essential element of a living ecosystem that we have to protect by all means.
I call for a new water ethic that says that we have to put water at the centre of our lives in everything that we do. Whether it’s energy policy, food policy, economic policy, trade policy, we have to say “what’s the impact on water?” If it hurts water, and hurts watersheds, we either have to adapt it or stop it.
RR: In principle four, which is “water will teach us how to live together,” you’re talking about coming together “around a common threat” — the end of water. That sounds quite ominous, but I think that you end on a really positive note because you’re saying that water is actually the way to find a way to live together.
MB: That’s absolutely right. Again, we have several choices. It’s totally possible that we’re going to see deep conflict – between nations, between rich and poor, between big urban mega cities and rural Indigenous people, farmers…between corporations and those who say it’s a public service – the conflict is coming. Our water supply isn’t going up. The supply is going down because we are mismanaging, destroying, plaguing, and polluting our current water stocks but the demand is growing. We have to say to each other…our historical differences, religious differences and so on mean far less if we understand that if we don’t come together around this shared body of water, and if we don’t find ways to govern it and protect it in a way that we can all live here, then our differences will mean nothing. I end the book with the concept that water may be nature’s gift to humanity, to teach us how to live more lightly on the earth and better with one another.
This article first appeared in the Leveller Vol. 6, No. 2 (Oct/Nov 2013).
