No Dasani. Just tapwater, please
BLUE COVENANT:
The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
By Maude Barlow
196 pp. The New Press $24.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
In public school, I learned about the earth’s hydrologic cycle: Rain fills lakes and rivers; water flows into the sea; evaporation causes clouds and rain. The cycle continues forever...
But maybe not. As we learn in Maude Barlow’s thoughtful Blue Covenant, humans are destroying that cycle.
Most of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, yet the world faces a freshwater crisis. Vast quantities of this finite resource are poisoned, polluted, diverted, mismanaged, wasted, or turned over to private control. Increasing areas are becoming desert. Many major rivers, such as the Colorado, no longer empty into the sea. The Aral Sea, once nearly the size of Lake Superior, is “an ecological disaster” that has lost over 80 percent of its volume.
Barlow, a Canadian water activist, lays out the complexity of the problem. Global warming is melting the glaciers that feed the world’s major rivers; agriculture uses considerable resources—“even a small bag of salad takes three hundred liters of water to produce,” she writes. Countries such as India export water in exchange for cash, causing or exacerbating their own water problems. Growth of biofuels will take massive amounts of water—trillions of additional liters just to handle California’s proposed ethanol production. Aquifers (water-bearing permeable rocks) that went untouched for millions of years are going dry, not to be replenished.
Meanwhile, making profits comes before slaking thirst. While water used to flow to its lowest point, now it flows to those who can pay. “Water privatization has failed to deliver water to the poor,” Barlow writes.
So why not simply desalinate water? Frankly, I had always thought the solution lay in more desalination plants. But that uses considerable energy and causes pollution, concentrating toxic chemicals that turn the ocean black and kill large amounts of sea life.
Barlow outlines a strong case for conservation and public control. Time and again, she describes privatization of water and its access to be a fundamental problem. All over the world, companies such as Veolia, Suez, and Coca-Cola buy up water rights and then sell the water to those who can pay the price. “The ultimate goal of private companies is to make a profit,” she writes, “not to fulfill socially responsible objectives such as universal access to water.” In fact, she claims that “The bottled water industry is one of the most polluting industries on Earth, and one of the least regulated.”
She points an accusing finger at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank as some of the powerful interests driving water toward private control. “It is evident that the world is moving toward a corporate freshwater cartel,” she writes, and this fact will determine who gets to drink and under what terms. Corporations may indeed be able to determine who live and who dies.
In clear, no-nonsense prose, Barlow addresses a compelling problem that demands the world’s attention. She backs up this slim volume with eight pages of source notes and suggested additional reading.
Occasionally the narrative seems to lose its passion with bloodless statements, such as “The French Bank Société Générale created an index-certificate for the specialized World Water Index WOWAX in February 2006 and promotes investment in the twenty largest global water companies...” I’m afraid statements like that and subtopics such as the Third World Water Forum—Kyoto, March 2003 temporarily dampened my interest.
Fortunately, Blue Covenant does more than describe the problem. In a chapter entitled “The Water Warriors Fight Back,” Barlow tells how citizens on every continent have begun to stand up for their water rights. In the final chapter, “The Future of Water,” she calls for “a global covenant on water” to provide for water conservation, water justice, and water democracy, and she outlines in broad strokes how to get there.
Blue Covenant is an intelligent, readable book that should prompt serious discussion among citizens and policy makers. Whether it provides all the answers, I don’t know, but for an excellent overview of the problem, I suggest that you start here.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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