For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's water-crisis
I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Suez and Thames, who get sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life.
Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die.
In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic than what comes out of the tap. The result is a gigantic mountain of empty plastic bottles that toxify the environment -- and three times more money spent on bottled water than it would take to solve the world's real water crisis. The companies like Nestle that pump out our aquifers use private investigators to harass people who sign petitions to stop them from pumping.
But it's not all doom and gloom -- low-cost, sustainable purification technologies like ultraviolet water-health run by village cooperatives can make dramatic development differences for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, who are able to maintain their own systems without foreign involvement. Local activists all over the world and fighting back and winning public, non-profit ownership of their waterworks.
The companies that control our water control our lives. Without us even noticing it, we've handed the planet's destiny to a few companies with a plan to line their pockets by holding our survival hostage.
Flow is seeking signatures for a petition to the UN: "Article 31: Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance."
FLOW is on the festival circuit -- if you get the chance, see this film. Link, Link to sign up for DVD release new
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There's just not enough profit in bringing the world potable water. I just came across this on YouTube, and I'm still laughing!
amwaywater
Isaac Asimov foretold the coming fresh water shortages 40 years ago. The math isn't that hard but like global warming, people don't want to know sometimes.
We just need Dean Kamen to create a dirt-cheap desalination system.
Also note that "public, non-profit ownership of waterworks" is NOT the same as universal access to water.
#3: Umm, he already did that. It was on Colbert a week or so ago. Seriously.
The bit in The Corporation that got to me the most was when Bechtel claimed exclusive rights to the rain that fell on Cochabamba.
"I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Suez and Thames, who get sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life.
Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die. "
That just seems like a bizarre caricature, not a serious analysis. One can debate the merits of the World Bank's PPFIA but plenty of people were dying of malaria and other diseases thanks to water systems run by corrupt, inefficient kleptocracies long before the World Bank ever proposed private solutions to water in developing countries.
For example, the CBC has an interesting and more nuanced look at the realities of water delivery in Bolivia here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html
That being said, they need to privatize water from the bottom up, not the top down, though its hard for the World Bank and the kleptocracies to get to that point.
For anyone interested, the New Yorker in 2002 published long, thorough piece on the Bolivia water war and privatization:
http://www.waterobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=33711
And according to SercOnline.Com, about 15 percent the water supply in the U.S. is privately owned (measured by volume delivered/customers served): http://www.serconline.org/waterPrivatization/fact.html
A bit off-topic: I wonder if this has any connection to F.L.O.W. For Love of Women, a modern set of dances choreographed by Moses Pendleton, which I recently saw performed by Diana Vishneva. I think it scandalized all the old people who were expecting ballet, but I was quite amused by the Daft Punk pyramid that they managed to make in the first segment, and the others were very fun and theatrical.
I also like Brian Carnell's comments very much, especially the paradigm of privatization from the bottom up.
"We just need Dean Kamen to create a dirt-cheap desalination system."
This is most definitely not the answer.
Desalination requires more energy and 'poisons' more water than it's ultimately worth. Desalination is to drinking water as Ethanol is to gasoline. A short term band aid to a much larger issue that keeps the masses quiet for another 50 years until those resources are found to be depleted as well.
If you are truly interested in becoming informed on this topic I hear this movie is a great source. Also, if you're down for a good read check out 'Blue Covenant' by Maude Barlow. Amazingly, informative piece of writing on the global shortage of water and how governments/corporations are stealing the water under our feet, literally.
"In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic than what comes out of the tap."
Back up that libelous, untrue, and basically made-up statement, Cory, or cross it out.