Maude Barlow loves to quote a line of poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Born in Nova Scotia, this dynamite advocate for water justice says, “Water is a commons, a public trust, and a human right.”

A global water justice movement has emerged to establish water as a right, which can’t be bought or sold for profit. One of the most prominent voices in that movement is Maude Barlow.

How is change going to happen on water? She told me, “I don’t think it’s going to come from the top. It’s going to come from the bottom up. People ask me, ‘Who will do this?’ And I say, ‘If you want to know who’s going to do this, go home and look in the mirror.’ It’s got to be us working together. That’s how it’s going to happen.

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. She is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award (the alternative Nobel Prize), and the Citation for Lifetime Achievement, Canada’s highest environmental award. In late October, she was appointed as the first senior adviser on water issues for the United Nations. She is the author of many books, and her latest is Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

For The Progressive, I’ve interviewed Arundhati Roy in the back seat of a car but this was a more unusual venue. We were in New York last March at the Left Forum at Cooper Union in the green room all set to do the interview when sounds from the speakers started to come through. We looked around backstage and the quietest place was the bathroom. I locked the door and made sure there was no running water. Despite the surroundings, Barlow did not miss a beat. She is unsinkable.

Q: How dire is the water crisis?

Maude Barlow: Americans need to know that there are thirty-six states in the United States that are going to experience serious to severe water problems in the next five to ten 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 Mead and Lake Powell, the big backup reservoirs, are themselves in crisis.

I feel a kind of desperation, almost, to tell this story so that people start to understand and grapple with it. This is the most important human rights and ecological crisis of our time.

Q: You say politicians “are in some kind of inexplicable denial.” Why is that?

Barlow: We live in a world where our leaders have adopted one vision of development: neoliberal economic globalization, market-based growth. 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.

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.”

The water crisis interrupts their theory that unlimited growth is sustainable. It’s not. If they really understood the water crisis and dealt with it, they would have to admit that we can’t keep going on the way we’re going on.

Q: The World Bank has made a prediction that 3.5 billion will not have enough fresh drinking water by 2025. Is that a credible estimate?

Barlow: 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. That’s why I find it so stunning that you still get people not knowing about this crisis or politicians refusing to deal with it.

This crisis isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse. As we add more people to the planet and as many of them are industrializing and getting on the consumer bandwagon and shopping, they’re also becoming huge water wasters, as we are in North America. And it’s not sustainable. For agriculture alone, we need 80 percent more water just to feed people in the next fifteen to twenty years. Nobody has any idea where we’re going to get it.

So it would really be helpful if the mainstream media would critique 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 actually a form of mass insanity to keep doing that when we’re running out of water.

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

Barlow: The biggest users of water are industrial agriculture, industry itself, and hydroelectric generation. 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 and poor industrial production practices.

Biofuels is a perfect example. 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 is, 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 our communities and watersheds.

Q: You use the term “water apartheid.” What do you mean by that?

Barlow: Close to two billion people are now without adequate access to clean water, and most are living in the Global South. We in the Global North need to remember there is a Global South 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 day 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 many countries, and you will see the majority of people having no access to water and the wealthy having access to all the water they could ever want. It’s privatized. Sometimes it has to be trucked in. It’s all provided by corporations.

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, but you will immediately die from a lack of clean drinking water.

Q: When did water become so imperiled?

Barlow: It’s really only in the last thirty to forty years that we started polluting water with massive urbanization. There have been slums in many cities, but cities in the Global South are suddenly burgeoning into ten, fifteen, twenty million people with peri-urban slums with millions and millions of people with absolutely no access to water.

A lot of it had to do 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, and growing crops summer and winter. 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. To wash those chemicals through, they used enormous amounts of water and in turn polluted vast amounts of water.

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. 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. 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 thirty, forty years old—then you have the ability to mine groundwater in a way that no other civilization has been able to do. 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.

Q: National security is a new framework to talk about water. In your book you write about former U.K. defense secretary John Reid, who warns of coming water wars. And a group of former, high-ranking military leaders in the U.S. reported to President Bush in April of 2007 that water shortages and global warming pose a serious threat to U.S. security.

Barlow: 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 last book, it had changed enormously. It started with 9/11 and the concern that water might be a target for contamination. 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 itself 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. The rightwing think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies has a project called Global Water Futures that Lockheed Martin is involved with.

When I found this out, I started to do research. It was like peeling an onion. I thought, isn’t this interesting? 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?

Q: Talk about bottled water and how it’s being marketed as something pure and fresh.

Barlow: It’s all marketing and hype by the water companies. We have this notion that it’s cool. And it’s got this image that’s connected to health and jogging and hiking. 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 and that may or may not be as safe as tap water. It’s certainly not as regulated. The government regulations around tap water are very strict in North America. There is less than one inspector responsible for all bottled water that crosses state lines in the United States. It’s about three-quarters of a job. It’s craziness.

We put something like 200 billion liters of water in plastic last year. That’s about 50 billion U.S. gallons. And 95 percent of that just ends up in landfills and is thrown into waterways. It’s not recycled.

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. You don’t care anymore because you don’t drink that stuff since you don’t trust it. And you’re not going to worry about whether it’s clean enough for poor people, because you’ve got your bottled water. 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.

Q: Is there a danger in one-off activist campaigns? For example, in India, Coke was driven out of a town in Kerala, and there have been campaigns in the U.S. against Nestlé and even Starbucks.

Barlow: I think that there can be a disconnect if people stay within their own parameters 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, who don’t see themselves as being progressive.

My favorite story is about 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. He is an eighty-eight-year-old former Republican businessman who has become quite radical. He’s going to save that lake. He’s turned all his money 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.

Q: What other positive initiatives are under way?

Barlow: 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 have so much in common, whether we come from a poor country like 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.

What’s important to know 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 because 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 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 ten years ago is happening to you.” So it’s been a tremendous movement to be part of.

I do believe that water is going to be the great connector. The tremendous 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.

David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His last interview for The Progressive was with Gore Vidal in August 2006.