[All] G&M today. !!!

[Norah Chaloner]

  Page 16 of today's Globe and Mail.  Excerpted. Pick up a copy to read
  the whole article.


  We are bringing her to Guelph Oct 9th .


  A living entity, water should have some rights of its own

VIDYA KAURI

The Globe and Mail

Aug 24, 2013

Ms. Barlow, 66, is nationally recognized as a staunch advocate for 
public control of water and equal access to clean water worldwide. A 
grandmother of four, the Ottawa-based writer has 11 honorary doctorates 
and several environmental awards for her tireless work. The first book 
in her series, /Blue Gold,/ was a call to people to understand that 
water is being captured by corporate interests and that governments 
should retain control of it. The second, /Blue Covenant,/ was about the 
international movement to fight water privatization. It ended with the 
statement that people had to push the United Nations to recognize water 
as a human right -- a global struggle in which Ms. Barlow was one of the 
leaders.

/Blue Future/ starts by announcing the achievement of that goal on July 
28, 2010. She spoke with The Globe and Mail about what needs to be done 
now that the goal has been achieved.

*What is the main argument in /Blue Future/?*

It is that we have to create a new ethic that puts water at the centre 
of our lives and around which we build all policy: Trade, economics, 
energy, food, you name it. If it hurts water, it has to be re-assessed, 
or dropped. The book is based on four principles. The first is that, if 
water is a human right, we have to find a way to pay for it. The second 
is that water is a public heritage, the third is that water has rights 
too, and the fourth is that water can teach us how to live together and 
we can find ways to see water as a means of peace-keeping and 
peace-making. For example, the warring factions in the Middle East who 
have unified to protect the Jordan River.

*Who profits from water in our country?*

Water is mostly still in public hands in Canada, but about three years 
ago, the Harper government tied funding to municipalities for new water 
infrastructure to public-private partnerships. Most people don't know 
about it, but it's quite dangerous because it locks municipalities to a 
private model, which is always more expensive. A lot of municipalities, 
including Regina and St. John's, by and large, don't want to privatize, 
but they can't get federal funds if they won't. The Harper government is 
keen to sign the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Europe, 
which would make it impossible to reverse that decision. So that's 
pernicious and just starting in Canada.

Also, Alberta is seriously looking at water trading, where you convert 
your licenses into a kind of property and you allow the owner of the 
licences to trade them. In the book, I look at two places that have 
allowed this: Chile and Australia. In both cases, they've lost total 
control of their public water. In Australia, the price of water 
skyrocketed because big farm conglomerates bought the licences from the 
small farmers and traded them on the open market. When the government 
tried to buy it back because it was drying up, they couldn't afford it.

*The water never stops flowing from my tap. Why should I be concerned?*

We are nowhere near as blessed as most people think. There's been a 
steady decline in water supply to Southern Canada because of 
overdraining. I was just up by Lake Huron a couple of weeks ago, and you 
can see where the water came to just a few years ago, and way, way, out 
where the water starts now. It makes me sad. You begin to have a 
visceral understanding of what it's like when a major body of water 
starts to retreat. It's partly climate change, partly over-extraction. 
The Harper government gutted the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which 
means that 99 per cent of our lakes and rivers are unprotected from 
pipelines going under or over them. They're moving tar sands crude over 
barges and ships across the Great Lakes. We're fighting nuclear 
shipments as well. It's like this whole new slew of threats to the Great 
Lakes.

Other large bodies of water have gone under in the world. They were so 
large it was inconceivable they would ever be gone, like Lake Chad in 
Africa. The Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union is almost gone. Lake 
Winnipeg is by some accounts dead because of the blue-green algae from 
nitrates from farms. Some scientists don't know if it's recoverable. 
Prince Edward Island is dumping nitrates into its groundwater for its 
potato farming. I can name them as we go across the country. I've just 
been in New Brunswick and they're planning fracking operations. My 
message to Canadians is: If we think that somehow we're exempt from the 
water crisis that is upon many parts of the world now, we should think 
again.

*What's our biggest challenge?*

In Canada, our biggest challenge is this myth of abundance. It's a 
global myth that goes back to learning about the hydrological cycle when 
we were kids. The water goes round and round and it can't go anywhere. 
That's true. It's still on the planet somewhere, but it's a problem when 
you displace it from where you can access it by massive transport or 
dumping massive amounts of surface water into oceans.

*You often speak of water in your book as if it is a living entity that 
can get hurt and has rights. What do you mean?*

This is newer in my thinking. I used to think about water in terms of 
equality of access. But I've come to see that we have a human-centric 
view of nature in that it's there to serve us. We need to start asking 
what rights an ecosystem has. I mean, stop and think what it would be 
like if the Gulf of Mexico could have sued British Petroleum? Of course, 
the gulf couldn't have, but what would it be like if our laws were more 
compatible with protecting water in and of itself? You have to start 
recognizing that if we live more compatibly with the natural world, it's 
going to be better for everyone.

/This interview has been edited and condensed./

stocks 
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/mathematician-advocates-for-being-you-own-adviser/article13937179/> 






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