Blue about blue

If you’re tired of feeling guilty, or contrary, about global warming, Maude Barlow has an under-reported crisis for you: Humanity is running out of clean water, and people already are fighting to the death for it.

Barlow leads Canada’s largest public advocacy group, and her new book advocates that the public wake up to the reality that hundreds of millions of people already have no good water source and that the rest of us, even rich Americans, are using up our supplies faster than nature can replenish them. (See the shrinking Colorado River, Rio Grande River and Great Lakes.) The book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, provides plenty of scary details and nightmare scenarios. (A million people in a Kenyan slum share 600 padlocked pit latrines.) Barlow also makes a cogent plea for the United Nations to establish water as a human right.

The biggest villains by Barlow’s account are for-profit water companies whose control of scarce water resources has aroused public outcries in poor countries around the world. Next in Barlow’s pantheon of evil are rich-country governments that pressure poor countries to hire the private companies, and poor-country governments that acquiesce.

Barlow insists on public control of water, but obviously a lot of public systems have failed to protect their water supplies. Barlow’s answer is for the small number of water systems that she admires to go out and teach failing systems how to do the job. Meanwhile, she trashes the desalination industry as a mass polluter. She also jabs again and again at companies that sell bottled water in rich countries where the tap water is already healthy, maybe even healthier, to drink.

Blue Covenant is a polemic, but it’s an eye-opening one for those of us who’ve never thought much about running out of water, despite the fact so many people already are desperate. It even makes links between water depletion and the climate changes (e.g. Australia) that we call global warming. Maybe that connection to a problem the public has already begun to recognize will help Americans think about what our free market policies are doing to water supplies in poor countries, and how our green lawns, washed cars, irrigated farms and water-hungry industries are using up our own H2O.

Evan