The outspoken Canadian activist tells (reporter) Erin Anderssen that she will bring the same doggedness she displayed in opposing NAFTA and globalization to her new post as the UN's senior adviser on water issues
"The water crisis is deepening everywhere," sighs the 61-year-old activist and head of the Council of Canadians, who has tasted tear gas and faced down stun guns in defence of universal access to clean water. What scares her most is that the problem will not get fixed for her grandchildren.
She says issues around water cover all the areas she feels most passionately about: gender, poverty, the environment, social justice. She describes returning from a trip in which she visited Nairobi's huge Kibera slum, where people use "flying toilets" (you defecate into a plastic bag and throw it in the street), and counting up her faucets and water lines in her Ottawa home. "I could turn them all on and run them for days, and nobody would say a word. We just take it for granted."
And she notes that many Canadians still believe that their country has 20 per cent of the world's water supply and is therefore safe from shortages. (In fact, scientists now say Canada holds closer to 7 per cent of the planet's fresh water, and much of that is too far north to be accessible.)
Consider the ready examples that belie our myth of abundance, she says: The Great Lakes are becoming increasingly polluted as their water levels fall, many aboriginal communities have limited access to drinking water and the oil-sands expansion continues to damage the ecosystem of northern Alberta.
Meanwhile, Canadians rank among the biggest per-capita users of water in the world. "We treat our water badly," Ms. Barlow sighs.
In deep water
1.1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water.
The World Health Organization has found that contaminated water contributes to 80 per cent of all sickness and disease worldwide. Half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.
In China, 80 per cent of major rivers are so polluted that they no longer support aquatic life.
By 2050, based on a population growth of three billion people, humans will need an 80-per-cent increase in water supplies to feed themselves.
In 2006, 200 billion litres of bottled water were consumed globally - a 200-per-cent increase since the 1970s.
For the price of one bottle of Evian, the average North American could buy roughly 4,000 litres of tap water.
Less than 5 per cent of plastic bottles around the world are recycled.
Source: Blue Covenant: the Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, by Maude Barlow
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081025.MAUDE25/TPStory/Environment
Stumble It!
All this destruction and its occasional, low percentage repairs, are part of the "growth of the GDP". The more we waste and destroy, the faster the "growth" and higher the "productivity".
As a member of the CoC since its beginning, my number is 3295, I pointed this out to Maude way back in 1991 and she replied that my Principle, cutting neoclassical economics to pieces on a single typewritten page, was "fascinating", but then ignored the whole thing, with the world going downhill at an accelerating pace ever since.
At least, now some scientists are finally beginning to wake up, according to some reports I've seen in the past few days, and start adding up the damage caused by fraudulent economics.
Ed Deak. Big Lake, BC.
So we may well and truly call ourselves a "berserker" species?
Ed Deak.