Munich American Peace Committee

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada's largest public advocacy organization, and the co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She is the recipient of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award, and the Right Livelihood Award, the alternative Nobel Prize. She is the author of many books including Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World's Water. Her latest book is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis.

"The water crisis," you write, "is like a comet poised to hit the earth. With rare exceptions, average people do not know that the world is facing a comet called the global water crisis. And they're not being served by their political leaders, who are in some kind of inexplicable denial. The crisis is not reported enough in the mainstream media, and when it is, it's usually reported as a regional or local problem, not an international one." Sketch out the parameters of the global water crisis.

The most important first thing to do is to say that we've actually mismanaged, polluted, displaced the world's water to the point where we've actually interrupted the hydrologic cycle, and that large parts of the earth are running out of water-it's not cyclical drought-and that our demand for water way outstrips our supply.
This shouldn't be so, so part of the problem is that everybody was taught about Grade 6 that there is a finite, closed hydrologic cycle, the water goes 'round and 'round; it comes back in the form of rain, so it evaporates into the clouds, and it can't go anywhere. We've all learned that. And particularly those us in the global north have just ingested this notion that you can't destroy water. In fact, what we have is what I call this myth of abundance. So in spite of the evidence in front of us, we're just refusing to see it.
Briefly the situation is this: We are polluting groundwater around the world. And that's in parts of the world, particularly in the global south, where people would have used that water for millennia in lakes and streams and wells and so on. And if you can't get at that water anymore, we're turning to other places for water.
So we're taking bore wells, and we are putting them down into the ground, 23 million in India alone, going 24/7, pumping up water exponentially fast. I call it water mining. Or taking water from wilderness, lakes, and rivers and so on, where it needs to be part of the ecosystem and moving it to big deserts to grow food, agribusiness and so on, where there really isn't any water. We're using this water for major cities. We have many, many major cities now. And if those cities are on the ocean, they're dumping that water into the ocean and they're not returning it. As we urbanize, we're paving over water-retentive landscape. We're also exporting water out of our watersheds in the form of what's called virtual water trades. That's where you use your water to grow or produce something that's exported out.
With all of these behaviors we're basically taking water from where nature put it and where it's basically needed for the ecological balance, and we're taking it to where we want it. And we're destroying it in the process. So we're running out of water in some very, very important places. All of northern China is in crisis, many parts of India, 22 countries in Africa, 677 lakes in Africa, every one of them in crisis, every one of them. The whole Middle East is running out of water. Australia has hit the water wall. Mexico City is sinking on itself. It's called subsidence. They've taken the water out underneath the ground, and it's just literally sinking. The same with Florida.
Americans need to know that there are 36 states in the United States that are going to experience, and I quote, "from serious to severe water problems" in the next 5 to 10 years. Right now there are at least seven states that are just absolutely at the water wall. The Colorado River is in catastrophic decline. This is not cyclical drought. Lake Meade and Lake Powell, the big backup reservoirs, are themselves in crisis.
So it's really, I feel, a kind of desperation, almost, to tell this story out there so that people start to understand and grapple with it. This is climate change. This is the first face of climate change and the most important human rights and ecological crisis of our time.

I'm interested in your comment that political leaders "are in some kind of inexplicable denial." Why is that?

It's really hard to imagine how the people of Atlanta, Georgia, weren't furious with their politicians for not saying something to them 10 years ago. My God, I knew 10 years ago. People who had been watching this 10 years ago knew that Atlanta would be in trouble. Why weren't people told? Part of it is this myth of abundance. Part of it, however, is that we live in a world where we have adopted or our leaders have adopted this one vision of development. That's the neoliberal economic globalization, market-based growth. So it's export competition. You've got to keep growing, you've got to compete by killing the other guy's farms, and so on. It's all based on this competitive model, and not on a much more cooperative local model of sustainable food or sustainable living.
So what's happened is, the water crisis comes along, and rather than face this, these governments and their corporate friends and their political leaders are all saying, "Well, it's just a temporary issue. We'll deal with it. It's kind of like energy. We'll find new sources. Don't you worry." Those new energy resources just happen to be environmentally devastating to get at. Nevertheless, we're not going to mention that. I think it's really a denial of the reality of the water crisis because it interrupts their theory that unlimited growth is sustainable. It's not. If they really dealt with the water crisis and really understood it, they would have to admit that we can't keep going on the way we're going on.
You try getting any political leader running for president in the U.S.-they're all going to sing from the same songbook, which is more growth, more jobs, more exports. And it's not sustainable.

Explain the terms "hot stains" and "water-stressed regions."

Water-stressed regions lead to hot stains. Water-stressed regions are regions of the world where either there isn't enough water for the demand or the water is being-so many countries in Africa would come to mind, or the Middle East-or there is abundant water, as in the north of China, but they've destroyed it. In China they've decided they can make 60 times more money from a drop of water if it's used to produce running shoes or toys for the world than to stay in a watershed and grow food. So you can take an abundant area and make it water-stressed because of what you've done to your water.
A hot stain is a part of the world that's actually running out. It isn't cyclical drought, or it's a combination of cyclical drought and lack of water that reinforces itself. These are parts of the world that are literally not going to be habitable without trucking in water or finding some new source of water. They are running out of water.

The World Bank has made a prediction that two-thirds of the world's population will not have enough fresh drinking water by 2025. Is that a credible estimate?

It's disturbingly credible. The World Bank and I would disagree on what to do with it. They would say privatize and let the market look after it. But that number, that two-thirds of the world's population, is pretty well agreed to by the World Watch Institute, the U.N., the Pacific Institute. It doesn't matter really who you're listening to, the crisis has been described pretty universally across the board. That's why I find it so stunning that you still get people not knowing about this or politicians refusing to deal with this. This crisis isn't getting better, this crisis is getting worse. As we add more people to the planet and as many of those people are industrializing and so getting on the consumer bandwagon and consuming and shopping and watching television and so on and all of that that it entails, they're also becoming huge water wasters, as we are in North America, as we are in the so-called global north. And it's not sustainable. For agriculture alone we need 80% more water just to feed people in the next 15 to 20 years. Nobody has any idea where we're going to get it.

Also in that opening statement that I read from your book you talk about the mainstream media not reporting enough, and when it is, it's merely limited to a local problem, not a global one. Talk about the media a little bit.

The media is getting better than it's been. There's all of a sudden been a rash of interest, particularly here in the United States, because all of a sudden it's become evident that there's a crisis here and people are beginning to understand that this isn't just going to blow away or some rain is going to come and take care of everything. When it starts to threaten your life and your livelihood and developers are saying there's no water, what are we going to do, suddenly there is an interest.
What I'm wanting from this renewed interest is more of an in-depth analysis of how can we live in a world of declining water resources and increasing demand with the economic and political situation that we've currently adopted. The answer is we can't. So it would really be helpful from our mainstream media if we could get more of a critique of our way of life and our notion of consumerism and people living in the desert building McMansions with nine bathrooms and lawns that need sprinklers and golf courses and swimming pools. It's not sustainable. It's actually a form of mass insanity to keep doing that when we're running out of water.

That's often the thing that's mentioned in terms of wasting water resources: swimming pools and golf courses and green lawns. But is that really as significant a drain on freshwater supplies than, say, other things?

Recently in the U.S. it's becoming more, that kind of individual development, because there is this building boom in the Southwest, where there isn't water. But, no, the biggest users of water are industrial agriculture, industry itself, and hydroelectric generation, which is just huge, so the need for more water to produce more energy. So the more we grow, the more energy we need, the more intensive our needs for water are. But the biggest culprit is the multipoint pollution from poor agricultural practices, poor industrial production practices, and then the overuse of water in industrial production.
Biofuels is a perfect example. In the book I have an example where the planned biofuel expansion, which is being subsidized in California alone, would take a third of the Colorado River every year. They don't have a third of the Colorado River to give to biofuel growth in California, but it's as if the department that's looking after subsidizing biofuels doesn't speak to the department that's, hopefully, worrying about water. We still haven't yet understood that everything we do is going to have to take into account our use and abuse of water. We're not going to be able to continue to farm in the same way. We're not going to be able to send this amount of water out of communities and watersheds.
I talk in the book about something that's fairly new and you're going to hear a lot more about it. It's called virtual water trade. That's where a country or a community uses its water to grow or produce something, and they export that product. So it's water that's embedded in an export. We haven't been taking that into account, so you get a lot of big corporations, like Monsanto and Cargill and all these big food companies that use huge amounts of water in a country or in a region, and then that food, or whatever that commodity is, is then exported and traded. But it's literally removing a huge amount of water from the watershed. We're going to have to ask ourselves, what local farming is sustainable for local use and what is being used to produce profit for big agribusiness? We're going to have to ask these hard questions. So far there has been none of that. California, the big farm lobby, which is a big corporate farm lobby, is so powerful that even though they actually have space on very little of the land, they use huge amounts of water. That's going to have to change.

Both Canada and the United States are huge consumers and producers of meat. To what extent is industrialized meat production contaminating or compromising the aquifer?

It's doing both, both contaminating and also using large amounts of water. People are stunned when they learn how much water is used to make even a bag of lettuce. Far less biofuels, far less meat. And the meat production in these big, intensive livestock operations both pollute in terms of the huge pools of manure, the big holding pens of manure that is then excreted out, but also just in the enormous amount of water that's used to feed the cows and for them to drink and for the food that they consume.
There are other huge water wasters. Another huge water waster is manufactured snow, believe it or not. A very, very large amount of water is used to make artificial snow. Usually they add a chemical to it to keep it at a crystal level, so that water is not only used but degraded when it's finished. I was in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January, and I noted, there you have a state that is entirely dependent on the snowmelt from the Rockies, and they're cutting down the trees and they're cutting down the shrubs that hold the snow up there to make more ski runs and more condos, ticky-tacky little condos, by the thousands.
There is a Farside cartoon where there's a bunch of dogs in a life raft, and they're watching the ship go down. They've had to take a life raft off this ship that's sinking. And one of them says, "Okay, everybody in favor of eating all the food at once put your hands up." It's like, well, We've got 10 years left of water. Let's see if we can whittle that down to five years by just abuse of water. It's this hubris that we have in the north that somehow if we run out of it, somebody will manufacture it, somebody will trade it, we'll go take it from somebody else, or technology will fix it. Believe me, there's no answer to the world running out of water.

You've talked about water apartheid, apartheid a term first applied to South African racial policies. How does it apply to water vis-à-vis the global south?

Of course, it's no surprise that the close to 2 billion people living in the world now without adequate access to clean water are living in the global south, although not entirely anymore. That's beginning to c hange.We in the global north need to remember there is a global south third world right here in our countries. The more water costs and the rarer it becomes and the more it's owned by corporations, the more it's going to be an issue of equity in our countries. But it is deeply an issue of north-south. More children die every die of dirty water than HIV-AIDS, malaria, traffic accidents, and war put together. Half the hospital beds in the world are filled with people who would not be there if they could afford water. You go to any country you can name, and you will see in some cases the majority, even the vast majority, like Pakistan, like big parts of India, just so many countries, 22 countries in Africa, where the poor have no access to water and the wealthy have access to all the water they could ever want. It's privatized. Sometimes it has to be trucked in. It's all provided by these corporations, Suez or Veolia or whatever. But they have all they want.
So water has become the most important symbol of inequity and injustice in our world, because you die from a lack of water. You may not die from a lack of education or the best health care in the world, but you will immediately die of a lack of water or drinking dirty water. So it's become the contested area in our world.

When did water become so imperiled?

It's really only in the last 30 to 40 years, since we started massively polluting water with the massive urbanization that's taken place, particularly in the global south and the creation of these mega-slums. There have been slums in many cities, but these cities are suddenly burgeoning into 10, 15, 20 million people with para-urban slums with millions and millions of people with absolutely no access to water.
I think a lot of it had to do, particularly in the global south, with the Green Revolution, which had good intentions at the beginning with the whole notion of feeding more people by monoculture crop production, doing away with biodiversity, double seasoning with the land, that you would grow crops summer and winter, which isn't good. What they didn't seem to realize or, I guess, realized too late was that the Green Revolution not only killed biodiversity but it took way larger amounts of water, because it's chemical-based. So to wash those chemicals through, they used enormous amounts of water and in turn polluted vast amounts of water.
And our population exploded in the last 50, 60 years. That population explosion combined with people leaving the countryside, leaving rural life and coming into cities, suddenly meant that this was a crisis.
And global warming and our fossil fuel production, which, again, is not that old in terms of the massive amount of use. It's post-Second World War. This is really a fairly new phenomenon. It stuns me how quickly we've destroyed water tables with our technology, with the ability to build great big pipelines and move water the way we're now moving energy around in pipelines. This is all fairly new. These technologies are fairly new. There are bore wells going down into the west side of Lake Michigan that go as deep into the groundwater as Chicago's skyscrapers go in the air. That's how big they are. They are sucking that water so fast that for the first time last year the water in Lake Michigan reversed its direction, and they are sucking in Lake Michigan water, not the aquifer water, which is a problem anyway because then they're taking the water that feeds Lake Michigan. But now they're actually taking from the lake.
When you have that kind of technology-and that's only 30, 40 years old-then you have the ability to mine groundwater in a way that no other civilization has been able to do because we're able to put bore wells down so, so, so, so deep into the aquifer. I call it water mining because it's like a gold-mining or a diamond-mining company: you come along and you take it all out, and when it's gone, you move on, which is a very different notion than sustainable use of groundwater or surface water.

In Bangladesh there has been a crisis dealing with these wells, because apparently they are so deep into the ground that the water has arsenic.

They've had to go so deep that they're now hitting a layer of groundwater that has arsenic. It's natural arsenic, it wasn't put in there by a mining company or anything, but it is nevertheless poisoning people. Millions of people have no options except those wells, because there is no public water system, no public water delivery if you don't have the money for it. I've seen the feet and hands of people who have arsenic poisoning. It looks like somebody took sandpaper and sanded their feet and their hands. It's just the most horrible condition that you get from drinking arsenic.

What's the political economy of water? I know you've said that Suez and Veolia, for example-these are two big French multinationals-are the two global water giants. Who are the other players?

Basically what's happening is that as water becomes more precious and as we are running out and our demand is growing, there's all of a sudden a mighty contest taking place around water. On one side are the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and a number of First World governments and a bunch of private corporations, who say, "Let's put water on the open market like a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder, and let's let the market take care of it." So all of a sudden there is a corporate grab for water.
And in every conceivable aspect, these utilities like Suez and Veolia-there are a bunch of others but those are the two giants-both from France, have been imposed all over the global south on poor countries by the World Bank, that says to them, "Well, if you want water service payments from us, if you want loans or whatever, you have to take these private companies. And they're going to come in and run the system on a for-profit basis." If you can't afford it, you don't get your water. So they've cut the water off to millions and millions of people.
There is also bottled water. We put something like 200 billion liters of water in plastic last year. That's about 50 billion U.S. gallons. And 95% of that just ends up in landfills and is thrown into waterways. It's not recycled. Bottled water is a huge $100 billion a year industry. And you get the actual trading of water, so the water rights or the actual physical water itself.
In California now they're trading sewage water because they're so desperate for water in some communities that the big developers will buy up huge amounts of sewage water or buy continuous sewage water from another city and then pay a corporation to clean it up.
There's tons of technology now in the water business. There is desalination. These great big desal plants that gobble up energy and put a terrible poison brine back into the ocean. Nuclear power desalination. There's nanotechnology. So there is a whole bunch of new corporations, like General Electric. It's not a new corporation but it's newly getting into the water business. Suddenly water is just the hottest commodity out there.
I deeply worry about it, because I believe that as we have corporate control of water, the price is going to go up and up and up and up, and the poor and even the middle class are going to struggle to find a way to pay for water. Also I worry because if you're a transnational corporation and you're making money from dirty water, from recycling it or desalination or whatever, or selling people the little bit of clean water that can be found left in the world, it's not in your best interest or the governments that you're pressuring to protect source water or to serve. So there is a clash between what we need to do, which is we need to stop polluting, and these great big corporations that are putting billions and billions of dollars into this cleanup technology, where they're increasingly putting their future business. There is a clash of values and ideals here between those of us who take the so-called soft path, conservation, watershed protection, and so on, to those who take the path that it doesn't matter what you do upstream, just downstream give us some money and we'll clean it up. And then who's going to own it and who will decide who gets access and who doesn't?

The World Bank, headquartered in Washington, D.C., has promoted what is called structural adjustment policies, market-based solutions, as you mentioned, to encourage privatization of the commons, as it were, the public resource of water. So in effect what they are doing is promoting a form of for-profit capitalism that benefits a handful of corporations.

They're absolutely doing that. Structural adjustment started out with different issues, health and education. They forced poor countries to give up on public services, energy, mining, transportation and so on. They would say, "Let our companies come in and run it." The latest of these structural adjustments is water. Basically, they're saying, "If you want debt relief," because these countries owe a great deal of money to the north, "then you have no choice. We're not going to give you any money for water services unless you do it our way."
There are several reasons for this. It's important for people to remember that in the global north we have public water services. Even the United States, which is the privatizing in a lot of areas, still has 85% of all its water services delivered publicly on a not-for-profit basis. So it's really hypocritical that we in the north, who have had the benefit of public water, have foisted this private system on the global south. I talk in Blue Covenant about how that happened, how the World Bank and the big water companies manufactured consent for privatization. There are really, I think, several reasons.
The first is that it benefits the corporations of the north. Let's just be honest. All the big companies that are going in there now taking advantage of water, whether it's bottled water companies or whether it's these utilities like Suez or whether it's these great big desalination plants, they're all north American or European or Japanese.
More importantly, I think, clean water has been seen and has been in the global north a tool to create public health and economic stability that led to industrial economic progress and a lot of control in the northern country over its own fate. The powers that be don't want that in the global south. They don't want to hand over that kind of tool to global south governments. They want to control that from the north. So controlling the fate of water is a really powerful tool for these governments.
It's also, if you don't mind my saying, a form of racism. I remember talking to some members of the European Parliament, liberals. I said to them, "Why a private system for the south when a public system for the north has worked?" They said, "Oh, well, we know how to do a public system in the north, but in the south they don't know anything, so we have to send our corporations to teach them." It was a not very veiled form of racism, if you look at it. But it's locked the global south into a model that has not worked.
One of the most important statistics that I can tell you is that in the 15 years of enforced privatization in the global south there has been a net decrease in funding for water services, basic sanitation and water delivery in the global south from the north, because they said, "Well, the private companies will invest." Whether they believed that or not, I'm not sure. I don't think they did. In any case, the corporations did not invest. They're not there to invest in water services. They're not there to deliver water services. They're there to make money. If they can make money, they stay. If they don't make money, they pick up their operations and off they go, back to France or wherever. The legacy of privatization has been an indictment of the global north.

Frantz Fanon of Martinique wrote about post-colonial states in a prophetic book called The Wretched of the Earth, where he said that these policies that were going to be implemented-he was sort of looking into the future-could only be carried out with the cooperation and collaboration of elites inside the targeted countries. So these post-colonial states are replicating some of the patterns of oppression from their colonial masters.

Absolutely true. I have a whole chapter in Blue Covenant on how the World Bank and these companies manufacture consent in the global south. They did it exactly by working with the elite. Don't forget, this is a class system. We have a global royalty around the world that have more in common with each other than they have with the citizens in their own countries, no matter where they come from. And the people who are running government usually-there are exceptions like Bolivia-but mostly people running governments in the global south are members of that class. They've bought hook, line, and sinker the ideology of privatization and deregulation and so-called free, unregulated trade and free, unregulated investment and corporate rule. They have bought this. So they hang out with their counterparts in the global north and they go for lovely dinners and they're driven here and there and they're put up in lovely hotels and apartments. And then they go home and they tell their people, "If you want to be a grown-up country, if you want to have all the things that those people in the north have, here are the ways that it's going to happen. This is the grown-up, modern, 21st-century way." Frantz Fanon was a prophet.

You mentioned desalination as one of the promised, heralded, high-tech solutions. There are a couple more that you talk about: dams and diversions. Can you explain those.

Dams and diversions. There are about 45,000 large dams in the world, and we are overdammed, we are damned. We have taken the mighty rivers of the world and we've dammed them way more than we should have. There is a case and a place for small dams. But these great big mega-dams take water that's flowing and they kill it. When you stop the flow of water behind a massive dam, you stop the flow of life, and that water starts to become poisoned. What we know about dams is that that's where all the buildup of phosphorus and pollutants and the salination of the land that takes place, behind the large dams. We've not only cut off the water of the rivers as they needed to flow and support streams and wetlands and so on, but also most of the major rivers in the world no longer reach the ocean. If you don't reach the ocean, that important spawning ground, where freshwater meets saltwater, which we now know is an incredibly important part of the creation of aquatic life, that's cut off. A lot of us are saying, those great big dams have to go. Not only should we not be promoting more of them, but they should go. But especially in India and China, the World Bank is still promoting these.
As Peter Glick of the Pacific Institute always says, "The World Bank has a certain amount of money it has to spend every year. And they love these big mega-projects, because they can put it all in a big mega-project or two and bring all their corporate friends in, and they all get real busy." He says, "The World Bank knows how to spend a billion dollars in one place, but they don't know how to spend a million dollars in a thousand places or a thousand dollars in a million places." Sometimes it's the smaller, more local, regional technology that's more appropriate, that the money should be going to. The legacy of big dams is the displacement of close to 800 million people in the world since the Second World War.

In India there was a popular movement to reverse a number of World Bank-sponsored and later government of India-sponsored dams called the NBA, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. They made a lot of noise and there was a lot of resistance, but ultimately the power of the state was just too overwhelming. I think all of those dams have been built or are going to be built.

The anti-dam movement in India is very powerful, and I don't think you're going to see them giving up anytime soon. Yes, they have lost a number of the major fights. But the same people who fought that fought something called river linking in India, which was a stupid plan to link all the rivers of India one way and another, again, by either dams or diversions or whatever so that there would be one great big river running through India. Led by people like Vandana Shiva, they actually got the government to back off. So, yes, it's true that so far the movement has not stopped the creation of the big dams. But there have been other successes.
You look at something like the Three Gorges Dam in China. Everybody predicted what was going to happen there. The Chinese government has recently admitted that there are problems. So who knows if this isn't something that's possible for us to learn as a species, even these governments that are so committed to these projects?
Desalination, everybody in certain parts of the world swears by it, except that Israel, where they swear by desalination and almost all their water is desalinated, is very concerned about a recent rash of studies that show that the food being grown with desalinated water has got something wrong with it. It's got to do with the mineral content that's removed from the desal water by the desal process and the chemicals that are used in that process. So sometimes as a human species we have to do stupid things and learn from them. Unfortunately, we're going to have to learn the hard lesson again and again and again.

In Blue Covenant you write about the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where a private consortium has a 22-year lease for the exclusive use of a 27-kilometre-long river. I should just add that Chhattisgarh is the site of one of the many insurrections that are going on against the government in New Delhi, which conveniently lumps all of them under the rubric of Maoists or terrorists.

This is the newest thing, to buy up whole aquifers. T. Boone Pickens is buying up aquifers in Texas, just sitting on them until that water becomes even more valuable. In Latin America and India these corporations are buying up whole river systems or leasing them for 99-year leases, which means they get to decide everything about that water use: who gets it, who doesn't get it, how much you pay for it. The decision is totally turned over from local governments to these corporations. Yes, there is huge resistance in a number of these communities against this, because it's so wrong. It speaks to you at such a visceral level that any corporation would think it can come in and make these kind of fundamental decisions, that I think that you're going to find a reversal in many communities around this ownership of water.

We've mentioned Bangladesh on India's east. On India's west is Pakistan, where there is an acute water crisis. I was in Karachi in December of 2007, and I learned that two islands right off the city coast have been sold for development. This will cause much distress to the fisher folk, who are going to lose their fishing grounds. In addition, the mangrove groves on the islands protect Karachi from storms.

Pakistan is a country in water crisis-and many other crises. Seventy-five percent of the people in Pakistan have no access to clean water. Seventy-five percent. It's just mind-boggling when you think of a country that size. Here's an experiment that the government about 10 years ago decided to try. It was with Nestlé. Nestlé put its Pure Life brand into Pakistan and made a deal with the government that it would somehow supply private water through bottling to the majority of its people. It was an absolute scam from beginning to end. I write about it in the book. And they're all tied up going right up to the Supreme Court, with the government of Pakistan basically saying, This was a mistake of ours. You have destroyed the water table. You've made water inaccessible to so many people. And Nestlé fighting back saying, We're suing you in the international court for investment settlements.
The story here is that always, always, always, where you have a combination of scarce water, growing water demands, and governments that are at some level corrupt or weak or whatever, and the World Bank involved, you're going to get these private companies coming in and making the situation worse than they started off with.

In the case of Pakistan it seems particularly bizarre that there is such a scarcity of water given the fact that some of the world's greatest rivers flow through the country: Indus, Ravi, Beas, and others.

As a species, we are polluting surface water at this extraordinary rate. Seventy-five percent of all of India's surface water, 80% of China's surface water is polluted. People shouldn't even be using them. And 90% of China's groundwater under its cities is polluted now. This is how careless we've been with this water. So when you can no longer access that water-well, you still access it. Let's face it. For a lot of people they have no choice but to drink water that's contaminated and has cholera warning signs along it and so on. But the reality is that we've massively destroyed this water.
Here's a little twist to everything that I think people should think about, and that is that China is desperately looking for water sources outside its own borders. They're building a pipeline from the Tibetan Himalayas to take water that now feeds all of the great rivers of Asia. If you want to see a coming water war, watch that situation as China starts to take more of the snowmelt-of course, those glaciers are melting far too fast-that belongs to all the peoples of Asia.

It's interesting that you should make that comment about coming water wars, because it seems that now national security is a new framework, a new way to talk about water. In your book you write about former U.K. defense secretary John Reid, who warns of coming water wars. There is, again, another report that you cite. A group of U.S. retired, high-ranking military leaders reported to President Bush in April of 2007 that water shortages and global warming pose "a serious threat to U.S. security."

This is fairly new. When I wrote my first book on water, Blue Gold, in 2002, there was no sign that the U.S. government was aware of water as either an international crisis or an American crisis. Fast forward. When I wrote and researched this book, it had changed enormously. It started with 9/11 and the concern that water might be a target for terrorists for contamination of water. So responsibility for water security was brought under Homeland Security. But that was just the first step. I don't know, maybe some of these reports started to finally get through that upper layer of government. And all of a sudden in the White House, the Pentagon, Congress, there was this fear, this realization that not only is the world facing these water crises and not only are there going to be conflicts and potential wars about water and not only are there now hundreds of thousands of water refugees in the world, but, my goodness, the United States is in trouble. So water as a national security issue has suddenly become absolutely key. I put it right up there with energy for the United States.
I believe the United States is looking to other countries outside its own borders for secure supplies of water, just like they're looking to secure non-Middle East energy from Canada and Mexico and other places so that they have friendly countries supplying this. There's a consortium advising the Bush administration called Global Water Futures. Global Water Futures is made up of a number of right-wing think tanks and corporations like Coca-Cola and some of these big desal companies, and Sandia Laboratories, which advises the Pentagon but is run by Lockheed Martin.
When I found this out, I started to do research. It was like peeling an onion. I thought, Isn't this interesting. The world's biggest weapons manufacturer is one of the key advisers to the Bush administration on water as a national security issue. I guess if you need the military component of securing these water sources or putting bases up around water sources, it's going to be handy to have Lockheed Martin.
I think that people need to know that particularly the two superpowers-and I consider China a superpower now, and the United States-are seeking water sources and supplies outside their borders. This is going to be a whole new reality. If you think they're in Iraq for energy, then where else would you go for water? And why wouldn't water be perhaps even more key to life and commercial and military superiority of a nation?

There is a certain country north of the United States that has fabled freshwater supplies.

This is such a myth. Here's the important thing to know. I do not think of that water as Canadian water that we will or will not share. My concern about Canada's water is that it will be corporately controlled and then it will be sold to Las Vegas, and it won't help any kid in the world who is dying today from lack of clean water. But what's really important to know is that you hear that Canada has 20% of the world's freshwater. That's only true if you were to drain every lake and river in Canada and make us a desert. We have about 6.5 of the available freshwater. But most of that is in great big, mighty rivers running north in the north. I have no more access to that water, living in Ontario or Quebec or Vancouver, whatever, than anybody in Texas does. To get at that water, we collectively on the continent would have to decide to reverse the flow of that water and send it in great big pipelines fueled by what, fossil fuel, nuclear power, probably, to reverse the flow of it. That would have enormous consequences for the north.
So I think we've got to stop thinking about it as Canada's water or U.S. water, but rather as water that belongs in an ecosystem in the north which will be desperately hurt if we decide that we're not going to change our way of life, we're not going to conserve water, we're not going to stop with our golf courses and our lifestyle that demands so much water, because, my goodness, there's that great big wet sponge up there. That great big wet sponge is an ecosystem, and it desperately needs the water that it has.

What was the 6.5 figure?

That's available freshwater. What that means is that there is water you can use in a country that isn't drawing down your capital. We in Canada are holding our own. We're using available freshwater. In the U.S. you're using way more of your water capital than you should be. In the U.S., Americans are now dependent on aquifer water, groundwater, that's depleting, for over 50% of your daily water use. So it's not sustainable. The measure is not how much water you use or need; it's how much you can use that won't devastate. Think of it like a bank account. There's your interest and there's your capital. The available freshwater is your interest. The capital that you don't want to start drawing down is the difference. We're now drawing down around the world way faster than the world can sustain us.

I was interested to read in terms of Canada that opposition to privatization is, as you call it, "strong and vigorous." Why is that?

We have a very strong history of public-sector involvement, from social programs and health care and pensions and so on to even investing in our governments. We have a national broadcasting system, our railways used to be owned by government, we had an airline owned by government. Because we live in a big, harsh climate, and if we didn't share, we wouldn't survive. So I would say our motto, if you will, the description of us as a people is that we share for survival, whereas in the United States it's much more survival of the fittest.
Even our founding principles. In the U.S. it's "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Ours is "Peace, order, and good government." We're boring as all hell, but we do invest more in the notion of the collective. So that notion that anybody could come along and own water that belongs to the indigenous peoples, that belongs to all of us just by being born in that place, which is also a responsibility-it's not just that you get to have it, but you get to be responsible for it-that's very, very deep part of who we are.
Sometimes in parts of the United States when I try to talk about that, I think they all look at me like I have a third eye in the middle of my head. I was in Lubbock, Texas last year at a conference. We battled it out. I kept saying, "You don't have enough water, and you're letting people like T. Boone Pickens take your water." This notion that if you can get it and you can buy it, you have a right to it just because you're rich. But what if other people need it? We just wouldn't allow that in Canada. So it was partly just my little Canadian, Scottish Presbyterian background. I do think water will be a great teacher to all of us. I really do.

Oil is being extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, What's that doing in terms of water?

The tar sands is an area of heavy oil. Instead of conventional oil, it's oil in what's called bitumen mixed with this thick, gooey mass of sand and other things. It's huge. There is enough heavy oil in the tar sands in northern Alberta to pave a four-lane highway to the moon with off ramps. The problem is it's not easy to get at. It takes a lot of energy, i.e., natural gas, and it takes a lot of water, because what they do is they steam-blast. They heat up the oil through heavy steam blast using water, and then the hot oil comes to the surface, and then they take it off. To get 1 unit of oil from the tar sands, we are destroying between 3 and 5 equal units of water. If we keep growing in the tar sands at the rate that we're growing, which is supposed to grow four- to five-fold in the next 15 to 20 years, we'll destroy the water table in northern Alberta. Alberta will become a water have-not province. We're now talking about oil versus water. You will hear that term up in Alberta.
What Canadians are concerned about is that that is all to send energy to the U.S. Almost all of the energy being produced in the tar sands is exported to the U.S., because under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we agreed on something called proportional sharing, and that is that we can't undo the exports, we can't diminish the percentage of our exports that we're sending south. So basically our energy is not ours anymore; it's North American energy. That's the way our water will go if we start to export it for commercial purposes.

There has been a huge explosion in bottled water in terms of its popularity. The top corporation, at least in the United States, is Nestlé, followed by Dannon and then Pepsi with its Aqua Fina and Coke with its Dasani. Talk about bottled water and how it's been sold into the collective mental aquifer as something pure, natural, and fresh.

It's all marketing and it's all hype by the water companies. Of course, they're the ones who convinced us that we have to drink eight glasses of water a day. Some people should drink that, some people shouldn't. That's too much water for some people. But they even told us how much water we should drink. And I actually in this book or the last one mention that this comes from the water companies. So it's really a case of mass delusion. We have this notion that it's cool. We've got this clean water and it's got this image of health and jogging and hiking, and you've got your bottled water. In fact, it's the exact opposite. I'm hoping the day will come when drinking commercial bottled water out of a plastic bottle will be as uncool as blowing cigarette smoke in somebody's face. I believe that day will come.
It is collectively crazy to be producing this amount of garbage and paying this much money for something that's deregulated or unregulated that may or may not be as safe as tap water, and generally it's not as safe as tap water. It's certainly not as regulated. The government regulations around tap water are very strict in North America. Around bottled water, there is less than one inspector that is responsible for all bottled water that crosses state lines in the U.S., less than one person. It's about three-quarters of a job. It's craziness.
The other thing about bottled water that gets overlooked is that when you decide to use bottled water as your water source because you're rich enough to be able to do it, you stop caring what comes out of the tap. It's the true privatization of water. If you stop caring what comes out of the tap, you're going to stop wanting to pay taxes for infrastructure repair, because you don't care anymore because you don't drink that stuff because you don't trust it. And you're not going to worry about it if it's clean enough for poor people, because you've got your bottled water, so you don't need to worry about poor people. It is really becoming a class issue, this notion of bottled water, being able to distance yourself from what we all need to have as a basic, fundamental human right and public service, which is good, clean water, guaranteed clean by our government.

Do you think there is a danger in one-off campaigns that really don't connect and sustain themselves? For example, in India Coke was driven out of a small town in Kerala, there have been campaigns against Nestlé here and there, even in the U.S. against Starbucks and its Ethos water.

I think that there can be a disconnect if people stay within their own parameter of an issue and don't make the connections with others. But my experience has been more positive than that. My experience has been that water has brought people into a movement who never before were interested, and it's brought people who don't see themselves as being progressive, they've never thought about politics, into a movement in a very particular way.
My favorite story is that the man who is leading the fight against Poland Springs, a Nestlé company in Fryeburg, Maine, a little town on the New Hampshire-Maine border, is an 88-year-old former Republican businessman who has become quite radical. He's going to save that lake. He's turned all his money and wealth over to building a movement to fight Poland Springs. He's just a great example of somebody who started caring about his own lake because it was being destroyed and then started caring about other people's lakes. Lately he's been caring about lakes and rivers in the Third World. It's really been wonderful to see this.
So I actually think water can be a wonderful bridge to issues around justice and equality, to a critique of economic globalization, market-based capital, the excesses of our system. Water can be an enormous teaching tool into a movement.

Talk more of what you describe as exciting initiatives underway.

There is a wonderful water justice movement here in the United States and around the world. We call ourselves Water Warriors. And we've taken the time to create a set of principles upon which we agree. We basically agree, for instance, that if you ask the question who owns water, we will say, "Nobody owns it. It belongs to the earth, it belongs to all species, it belongs to future generations. It's a fundamental human right and a public service and a public trust." We've gone through our mantra and we've struggled with this. So we have so much in common, whether we come from a poor country in Bolivia or a wealthy city like New York. We're working with people in Paris who are finally getting their government to reverse its position on privatized water, and I think they're going to reintroduce public water in Paris. So it can be so diverse.
But what's important to know about it is it's based on solidarity and the notion of justice. It is not based on the notion of charity. It's not the people in the global north coming and building wells, digging wells for those poor Africans. It's based on the notion that there is a reason that governments in the global south can't provide clean water for their people, i.e., because they owe so much money to the global north in debt repayment or our corporations have done deals with them or paid them off or whatever. We're building a movement on the basis of justice, and we have no more knowledge or power in the global north in this movement than those in the global south. In fact, they're often the ones who are the teachers and often the first ones to say, "Here's what you need to learn about what you need to do now, because what happened to us 10 years ago is happening to you." So it's been a tremendous movement to be part of.

We're at the Left Forum in New York at Cooper Union. Earlier today you spoke to an overflow crowd on a Sunday morning. Do you find that there is growing interest in the topic of water?

Yes. I wasn't at all surprised by the numbers. I went to some of the other sessions earlier, and you would have something like 30 people or whatever. Ours was packed. It's because, it's such a real issue. People feel sometimes you can live a little too much in your head. This is living viscerally. This is a life-and-death issue. As a friend in Bolivia, said, because I asked, "Why water more than other issues?" He said, "Because I'd rather die of a bullet to my head than to die the way I know it hurts to die of dirty water or to die of no water." It has become such a standpoint around the world. I think people realize that.
But the other thing is, for Americans it's here. It's not far away anymore. Tell me a day when you pick up a paper that you're not reading about some new pollution, a concern about hormones and pharmaceuticals in the water, some new city that's running out of water, some new sinkhole that opened up in Florida, wherever. It's here now. The reality is here. I do believe that water is going to be the great connector with the global north and the global south, and that tremendous and deep interest in this issue is just wonderful and gratifying and exciting. Also, people like the success stories. There are wonderful success stories, and people are hungry for those. This is a good movement to hang around with.

I wish people could see you, because you're animated and engaged.

I live, eat, and breathe this water issue, from just the look of water and caring for water and hating to see it stuck in plastic or just being crazy when I see pollution going into it, the effect on people.
I remember the first time that I really saw-it was years ago-a poor community. It was in Mexico, along the maquiladoras, and I saw what was happening to water. I wept all the way home on my flight. And I just counted the water sources in my own house. I'm not a rich person; I have a perfectly ordinary house. But I have seven places that I could turn on the water. I could turn them on all together if I wanted. There is nobody to say, "Turn that water off." If you count the laundry room, the kitchen, two bathrooms, the front and back hoses-we don't even have lawns but we still have taps out there-I could turn them all on at once. And I realized the deep, unbelievable inequity and the carelessness with which we use water.
Of course, water is just a metaphor for everything else: our food, our clothing, the privilege of education. But water changes your life. Because it's life and death and because it's such an issue of equity and because the human species is going to be kicked off the planet if we don't get our act together, this has just got to be the issue, for me, anyway.

And your Web site?

FoodandWaterWatch.org here in the U.S.; Canadians.org in my country. And there are many, many wonderful organizations. You will see links on both of those sites to groups and movements around the world.

(Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this transcript.)

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