Backbone > Life in the Balance

Precious Resource
By Susan Piperato . Photo by Roy Gumpel

Once upon a time, people could dip their cupped hands into any lake or creek to gather water for drinking and the water was always pure and clear and sweet. Or so the story goes. But while water will always be the stuff of life—indeed, especially of healthy human life, accounting for 90 percent of the composition of our bodies at birth and 75 percent in adulthood—it’s starting to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Although the world’s water sources have been in trouble since the dawn of the Industrial Age, it was not until 1962 and the publication of Rqachel Carson’s Silent Spring that most Americans took notice. Carson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning wakeup call inspired the formation of the ecology movement, which was built largely around protecting and preserving major waterways. But the public’s initial concern has been over the quality—not the quantity—of water. While the pollution of the Hudson, for instance, seems outrageous, that it would ever dry up is unimaginable. Coleridge’s famous lines, “Water, water everywhere / Nor any drop to drink,” ring so true for the public they could serve as a motto for the burgeoning bottled water industry, whose marketing message reads: If the stuff that comes out of your tap is unsafe and nasty, there’s still “good,” safe bottled stuff around. What they’re not telling us is where the “good” stuff in bottles comes from: municipal water sources overtaken by corporations, steadily mined and unreplenished groundwater sources—or in the case of the popular brand Poland Spring, an asphalt parking lot 30 miles from the now depleted Maine aquifer. And despite studies of bottled water conducted by the National Resources Defense Council (nrdc) in 2000, which show that most water bottles are not recycled and fully a third of all bottled water contains bacteria including e coli cryptosmardium, making it unsafe to drink, we keep believing in the hype. The nrdc survey shows that half of all Americans consume bottled water, with one-third drinking it regularly. But if we, as consumers and activists, do not act against what amounts to the private sector’s earmarking water as a potentially highly profitable commodity by giving up the bottle and looking more closely at the world’s waterways and our own community’s supply, we could rewrite Coleridge’s lines to read: “Water, water no where/And anything we’d drink.”

As water pollution has increased steadily around the world, so has the level of chemical treatments needed to make it safe for drinking. An even greater threat than pollution now faces our drinking water in the form of commercialization as multinational companies, the World Trade Organization (wto), and both beleaguered and power-hungry governments lock into positions that, if left unchecked, will turn water into a commodity rather than a fundamental human right. As the Water Stewards Network (wsn) Web site explains, the mandate given to the wto upon its establishment in 1995 (when it replaced the 1947 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) to eliminate all barriers to the free flow of capital, goods, and services by promoting deregulation and privatization—with rules enforced through tribunals of corporate-appointed trade “experts”—is allowing corporations and individuals in favor with the wto, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to begin turning on and off the world’s taps and redirecting its pipelines.

“In order for a country to receive financial aid, it must open its markets to direct foreign investment and privatize its public industries and services,” reads WSN’s literature—and that often includes water. Enter the euphemistically titled Public-Private Partnerships program initiated by the 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services (gats), designed to extend wto jurisdiction to the former exclusively public-dominion economy (including water, education, culture, communications, environment, libraries, transportation, food, and health). Because gats is a multilateral agreement, negotiation of new sectors and new rules is continuous. Hence, the World Bank currently has $20 billion in commitments for water projects and the wto has officially defined water as commercial in every way—as a “good,” “service,” and “investment”—allowing the wto’s rules to trump both national and international law. No wonder water is expected to be this century’s blue gold.

And none of us are innocent of helping turn water turn into a commodity. If you’ve ever drunk bottled water, visited an irrigated city or resort that exists like an oasis in the middle of a dust bowl (Los Angeles, say, or Tempe or Albuquerque), eaten the fruits of a water-intensive crop that’s been grown in a desert where nature never had any intention of anything growing (like alfalfa, especially popular among Las Vegas farmers), worn sneakers or even bought a plastic item as innocuous as a shower curtain made in China, then you have partaken of the products of massive water diversion projects that are draining groundwater sources and changing not only the courses of waterways but of history.

“We’re creating a world that’s so topsy-turvy the water no longer flows downhill—it flows toward the money,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently told a packed audience at the national conference, “The Water of Life: Peril and Promise in the 21st Century,” held at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck last month. The picture painted by Kennedy, the environmental lawyer for both Riverkeeper and the NRDC, together with eight other internationally renowned environmental activists and writers—including Vandana Shiva and Ralph Nader—of Earth’s waterways’ present condition and future outlook is one of monumental environmental damage. “Water diversion projects” are currently being undertaken throughout the world, from Canadian groundwater, like that of the Ogalala Aquifer, which is steadily being depleted by more than 200,000 wells a day at a rate that’s between eight and 14 times faster than it can be replenished, to irrigate Nevada’s golf courses. Meanwhile, India’s Himalayan rivers are being turned away from valleys—traditionally farmed by peasants, who are being left with neither livelihood nor running water—to industrial cities. In the us, not only have several states condemned the entirety of their freshwater fish as unfit for consumption, but this year Connecticut declared hatchery-grown red trout as its only safe freshwater fish. Even closer to home, the fish at Neversink Reservoir, “traditionally the Catskills’ most remote and highly protected reservoir,” Kennedy said, were recently tested to be too mercury-contaminated to safely eat—largely from airborne pollution from heavy industry in Ohio.

“This is the face of globalization, this is the final battle, this is Armageddon,” Kennedy said. “And the forces of ignorance and greed are going to greet us with the seduction of a warm handshake and a congenial smile, and then they’re going to divert the rivers toward the big money. These are extraordinary efforts to privatize the commons—those aspects of our planet that are vital to life.”

According to conference presenter Maude Barlow, a Canadian water activist, the potential global water market is currently estimated at $1 trillion, which includes “25 billion gallons we put into little plastic bottles last year,” a market that’s growing at 20 percent annually. “We have this notion that you can step outside the decline of our public water supplies if you can have access to clean water,” she explained. “And in the us more than 50 percent of all water comes from groundwater sources, and our per capita use of water is doubling every 20 years.” And, “at the rate we are using water,” Kennedy said, “by 2025 our need for water will have outstripped our resources by 56 percent.” How could we allow such a thing to happen? In other words, "When on Earth did water go from being an essential liquid upon which all life depends...to a commercial ‘beverage?’” as E magazine publisher Doug Moss asks with a hint of sarcasm in the magazine’s September/October 2003 issue. Simple, says Barlow: “We have the technology to use and abuse water—and we don’t have to think about it.”

Yet our unconcerned chugging and pumping away is turning Earth into a bad apple, she says, “with hot stains appearing, the way marks appear as an apple starts to dry up” in places like China, where 400 of 600 major northern cities are now in severe, industrially induced drought and farm communities are literally waking up to find their wells diverted; the Middle East, which will lose all water within 50 years; Mexico City, which plans to move many of its 28 million inhabitants in 10 years due to predicted water shortages; 22 African countries; and South Africa, whose demand for water is growing four times faster than the amount of its supply.

Still, says Barlow, communities around the world are wising up. Two years ago in Bolivia, for instance, the people rose up against the bottled water company Bechtel, which took over water supplies and began charging people for every drop used, including rainwater collected in cisterns on their own roofs. “The army was called in, people were killed over this, but Bechtel was sent out,” she says. “And now, thanks to the wto, [Bechtel is] suing little Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, for breach of contract.” Nonetheless, she remains steadfastly hopeful. "We’re finding each other, letting each other know [about] these companies...using the Internet brilliantly. This is a reckoning. In 10 years, how we will live with what we have done to the water resources of the world? Now is the time to start thinking of what to do about it.” And while we’re thinking, start acting. “We’re not dealing with an esoteric substance here,” said Nader. “It’s water. We’re all drinkers, washers, flushers and users. Ask why commercialization of water is so bad. Keep public control of public resources.”

sidebar: PROTECTING WATER RESOURCES
The following are resources for public water activism:

The Burlington, VT–based Water Stewards Network (www.WaterStewards.org; info@waterstewards.org) is dedicated to water awareness campaigns and activism.

Public Citizen strives to keep water as a public trust through its Water for All Campaign. Contact pc’s Washington, DC, office at www.wateractivist.org, cmep@citizen.org or (202) 546-4996.

For more information on water-takings, both underway and in the planning stages, by multinationals like Bechtel, Suez and Vivendi, as well as political background on the Bush administration’s perception of Canada’s water supply as "part of America’s security and energy future," according to Maude Barlow, visit www.canadians.org, www.PolarisInstitute.com, and www.interfaceinc.com.