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Villager Leader
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Posts: 5,749
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04-02-05, 05:28 PM
Posted:02/02
by anita roddick
Take It Personally – Dame Anita Roddick
Water is elemental, life-giving and sustaining. It is ours to drink, ours to play in, to grow with, to build on. Water is more fundamental than any other substance on Earth: You can live three weeks without food, but without water you’ll be dead in three days. There is no more basic need than survival, and no substance on earth more crucial to survival than water. This makes it attractive to privatize and commodify, and one worth fighting and dying for. It is a capitalist’s dream, and a warrior’s cause.
But water cannot be simply a commodity to be exchanged and bartered by a few corporations, owned and controlled by big business. It is a human need and a right.
In the West I am seeing how prosperous agribusinesses have become addicted to expensive, outlandish solutions for turning deserts into farmland any place they can get their hands on. River systems are being diverted or choked off right under our noses, wilderness destroyed to keep crops growing where they do not belong (not to mention golf courses, racetracks and suburban lawns). Seemingly endless irrigation canals lose thousands of gallons of water to evaporation in a single hot and windy afternoon. Natural swamps are dying in the American South thanks to the cotton industry. Water used for the irrigation of these pesticide-laden crops has nowhere to drain, so it is customarily pumped into “evaporation ponds� – visibly foul, noxious soups of toxins rendering the soil beneath them lifeless and life-threatening.
What a dismal state of affairs.
I’ve done a lot of traveling in the Southern Hemisphere, as well – to places where they have no water and to places where they have too much. The people at these two extremes often have more in common than you’d think.
Physics dictates that water takes the path of least resistance, but for most people on this planet, the path to water is bloody hard road. One billion people worldwide do not have any water within a 15-minute walk of their homes.
In Africa, 40 billion working hours are lost each year because people, mainly women, have to spend them fetching and carrying water. The average African family uses about 5 gallons (23 liters) of water a day. When you consider that the average American family uses more than 100 (460 liters), it’s just as well they don’t have to walk to get it.
People say that there will be wars over water. Will be? There always have been. There are scads of references in the Bible to water. Back then, as now, the power politics of the Middle East is still centered on water. We forget that the immediate cause of the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and the Arab states was over access to water. Since seizing the West Bank, Israel has been using 79 percent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer and all of the water from the Jordan River basin. The crisis today is about land, yes, but also – and perhaps more so – about the water that flows under, into, and out of that land.
Wealth follows power, and power follows water. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told me, “We are witnessing something unprecedented: Water no longer flows downhill. It flows toward money.�
That fact is hardly lost on the multinationals. “Water is one of the great business opportunities,� notes Fortune Magazine. “It promises to be for the 21st century what oil was for the 20th.� Coca-Cola’s 1993 annual report said, “All of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world’s 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day. If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola, then we assure our future success for many years to come. Doing anything else is not an option.� (Coca-Cola owns dozens of bottled water brands, including Dasani and Evian in the United States, Pump in Australia, and Malvern in the UK. Pepsi is a close competitor, but Nestlé has both beat with 77 global brands.)
And maybe this is what the future will look like – depleted water supplies will have changed everything: fresh, naturally clean water will be so rare it will be guarded by armies. Ammunition for a toy water pistol is more expensive than platinum, riot police squads negotiate instead of firing water cannons (no bad thing). Imagine no more umbrellas! Naturally clean water is going the way of the dodo, and we need to do something about it now.
Fortunately, fighting back is the new politics of the 21st century. Everywhere power is being dissolved down to the level of the community. In this grassroots global revolution, we find people are quietly getting on with changing the lives of their communities positively. And where people are finding creative technological solutions undreamed of by the Microsofts, Bayers, and Exxons of this world.
These people know that freedom isn’t just about the right to vote a dozen times during one’s life, but the right to decide one’s economic as well as political destiny. And that is precisely what economic globalization is stealing from people all over the world.
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| imported post |
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Villager Leader
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Posts: 5,749
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: virtualcity, ,
|
|
|
imported post -
04-02-05, 05:29 PM
Take It Personally – Dame Anita Roddick
Water is elemental, life-giving and sustaining. It is ours to drink, ours to play in, to grow with, to build on. Water is more fundamental than any other substance on Earth: You can live three weeks without food, but without water you’ll be dead in three days. There is no more basic need than survival, and no substance on earth more crucial to survival than water. This makes it attractive to privatize and commodify, and one worth fighting and dying for. It is a capitalist’s dream, and a warrior’s cause.
But water cannot be simply a commodity to be exchanged and bartered by a few corporations, owned and controlled by big business. It is a human need and a right.
In the West I am seeing how prosperous agribusinesses have become addicted to expensive, outlandish solutions for turning deserts into farmland any place they can get their hands on. River systems are being diverted or choked off right under our noses, wilderness destroyed to keep crops growing where they do not belong (not to mention golf courses, racetracks and suburban lawns). Seemingly endless irrigation canals lose thousands of gallons of water to evaporation in a single hot and windy afternoon. Natural swamps are dying in the American South thanks to the cotton industry. Water used for the irrigation of these pesticide-laden crops has nowhere to drain, so it is customarily pumped into “evaporation ponds� – visibly foul, noxious soups of toxins rendering the soil beneath them lifeless and life-threatening.
What a dismal state of affairs.
I’ve done a lot of traveling in the Southern Hemisphere, as well – to places where they have no water and to places where they have too much. The people at these two extremes often have more in common than you’d think.
Physics dictates that water takes the path of least resistance, but for most people on this planet, the path to water is bloody hard road. One billion people worldwide do not have any water within a 15-minute walk of their homes.
In Africa, 40 billion working hours are lost each year because people, mainly women, have to spend them fetching and carrying water. The average African family uses about 5 gallons (23 liters) of water a day. When you consider that the average American family uses more than 100 (460 liters), it’s just as well they don’t have to walk to get it.
People say that there will be wars over water. Will be? There always have been. There are scads of references in the Bible to water. Back then, as now, the power politics of the Middle East is still centered on water. We forget that the immediate cause of the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and the Arab states was over access to water. Since seizing the West Bank, Israel has been using 79 percent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer and all of the water from the Jordan River basin. The crisis today is about land, yes, but also – and perhaps more so – about the water that flows under, into, and out of that land.
Wealth follows power, and power follows water. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told me, “We are witnessing something unprecedented: Water no longer flows downhill. It flows toward money.�
That fact is hardly lost on the multinationals. “Water is one of the great business opportunities,� notes Fortune Magazine. “It promises to be for the 21st century what oil was for the 20th.� Coca-Cola’s 1993 annual report said, “All of us in the Coca-Cola family wake up each morning knowing that every single one of the world’s 5.6 billion people will get thirsty that day. If we make it impossible for these 5.6 billion people to escape Coca-Cola, then we assure our future success for many years to come. Doing anything else is not an option.� (Coca-Cola owns dozens of bottled water brands, including Dasani and Evian in the United States, Pump in Australia, and Malvern in the UK. Pepsi is a close competitor, but Nestlé has both beat with 77 global brands.)
And maybe this is what the future will look like – depleted water supplies will have changed everything: fresh, naturally clean water will be so rare it will be guarded by armies. Ammunition for a toy water pistol is more expensive than platinum, riot police squads negotiate instead of firing water cannons (no bad thing). Imagine no more umbrellas! Naturally clean water is going the way of the dodo, and we need to do something about it now.
Fortunately, fighting back is the new politics of the 21st century. Everywhere power is being dissolved down to the level of the community. In this grassroots global revolution, we find people are quietly getting on with changing the lives of their communities positively. And where people are finding creative technological solutions undreamed of by the Microsofts, Bayers, and Exxons of this world.
These people know that freedom isn’t just about the right to vote a dozen times during one’s life, but the right to decide one’s economic as well as political destiny. And that is precisely what economic globalization is stealing from people all over the world.
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