Barlow's Water Rage Set to Hit the UN

Maude Barlow has many fears about the future of the world's water. Most prominent among them is that her dire predictions that the world is running out of this precious resource will come true.

Just returned from a tour of the Alberta tar sands, Ms. Barlow seems at a loss to do anything but sigh in frustration during an interview with Embassy last week over what she saw there.

The stench emanating from the smokestacks was more repugnant than she ever imagined possible, she says, the pollution permeating across what was once a prairie haven has turned the land black, and the waterways are filled with chemicals.

"Are we crazy?" she asks in exasperation. "Those ground water sources up there will all be polluted. That is water that could last us thousands of years."

Driven by a sense of panic for the future, Ms. Barlow has spent 23 years travelling the world and taking on the "barons of the water world." As chair of the public advocacy group the Council of Canadians, she has fought against the privatization of water in Canada, and around the world.

Now this activism has taken her beyond the picket lines to the heart of the United Nations. As the newly-minted senior adviser on water to the president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, Ms. Barlow is tasked with raising the profile of water-related issues as one of the most immediate global crises, alongside poverty and the food crisis.

"Father Miguel," as Ms. Barlow calls him, has some pretty strong socialist views, she says. A liberation theologian priest and veteran of the Sandinistas struggle in Nicaragua, Mr. Brockmann has made his life's work helping the poor. After becoming president of the UN General Assembly in June, he was keen to track down Ms. Barlow, so she flew down to New York in August to meet with him.

"I met with him and with his team. We had a briefing from all the agencies at the UN to do with water, including UN Water, the body that co-ordinates all the water projects at the United Nations," Ms. Barlow recalls. "It was very exciting, and he said 'Would you work with me?' and I said I'd love to."

Ms. Barlow has keenly taken on the position, but insists on playing an advisory role only so that she can stay in Canada and continue in her role as chair of the Council of Canadians.

"It's not a job, I'm not staff and I'm not paid and I'm not moving there. But I am in daily contact with them and we've got lots of plans."

Sitting in the living room of her country-style Ottawa home three weeks after her appointment, and on the very morning of the American election, Ms. Barlow, for whom hope is a "moral imperative," describes her new appointment to the UN as coming at a "lovely moment" in history.

Despite this optimism, however, Ms. Barlow, a mother of two and grandmother of four, is frighteningly frank about what is happening to the earth's water.

She lists off the staggering ways in which the global water crisis has already taken a devastating toll around the world; more deaths are caused by waterborne illnesses than by war, traffic accidents and HIV combined, while more than 80 per cent of all illness and disease are waterborne, and one in three Africans do not have access to clean water. Within 10 years, that number will be one in two, she says.

"On this water crisis, I fear I'm very right. I fear the world is really, really headed for the most terrible thing it can imagine, which is running out of clean water," Ms. Barlow says. "And how you die when you run out of clean water is so awful. I've witnessed it so often and I so don't want more of it."

Making water a political priority, however, remains a relatively elusive goal, illustrated for Ms. Barlow in the lack of attention it received throughout both the Canadian and American federal election campaigns this past fall.

"I find it astounding that in both this country and the United States, there was another federal election with not one mention of water. I find it astounding. I mean in the U.S., there are seven states in absolute crisis now," Ms. Barlow says. "To me it's such a disconnect and it's still the biggest problem we have."

With so much to say and with such an urgency to make her voice heard, Ms. Barlow takes few pauses, until now. She looks up over the top of her tea cup, and just before taking a sip, smiles.

"We'll get there," she says, determined. "Because I'm stubborn."

What she's fighting for most, she says, is to ensure the world's clean water is protected and that the private sector is not given free reign to dictate its cost.

As water disappears from many parts of the world, and as what's left of it becomes increasingly polluted, Ms. Barlow says she's witnessed the private sector taking on a bigger and more powerful role in controlling the fate of clean water.

What this means, she says, is that not enough is being done to conserve clean water at its source, and too often faith is put in the wonders of technology to clean up after the world's dirty habits.

"What I'm seeing, and this is the worst part of the privatization, is there is almost no concentration on [protection] and it's almost like technology will fix everything, so let the water everywhere get dirty," Ms. Barlow says. "The question will be: Can we protect the sources we have as best as we can or are we going to cavalierly destroy them and then assume technology will clean it up?"

It was 23 years ago that Ms. Barlow first started "fussing about water" and quickly found herself in the eye of the storm in the emerging debate about this precious resource. In 1998 she wrote her first report analyzing the political question of who owns water, entitlted Blue Gold: The Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supplies.

In the two decades since, the longtime Canadian activist has travelled the globe to witness the horrific effects caused by shortages of clean water. She's written two books on the issue, Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World's Water and Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water, and co-authored more than a dozen others. She co-founded the international Blue Planet Project and sits on the board of several other international groups. In 2005, the longtime activist was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel.

Ms. Barlow's outspoken cries against the might of corporations for so many years, however, have also garnered her some fierce critics.

"Oh god," she laughs when asked about those who have, in turn, taken her on. In Canada, she has come up pretty hard against the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, she says.

And there is clearly no love lost between her and the Harper government, which, she says with much disdain, has "completely resisted any calls for protection of our water."

"We don't even know how much ground water supplies we have, there's been no mapping, we've just been absolutely cavalier and the federal government is responsible for enforcing the Federal Fisheries Act, which it doesn't do," she says.

Equally turned off by her tactics, former environment minister John Baird delivered a shot at Ms. Barlow in the middle of a candidates' debate held in his Ottawa West-Nepean riding during the election campaign this past October.

When a woman in the audience, who identified herself as a member of the Council of Canadians, accused the Conservatives of being "out of synch" with Canadians on the environment, Mr. Baird replied the Tories "were out of synch with Maude Barlow."

Mr. Baird's sharp-tongued response rallied cheers from his supporters, and prompted a defensive statement from NDP candidate Marlene Rivier, who said she couldn't let Mr. Baird "diss" Ms. Barlow.

Another critic is journalist and author Chris Wood, who also delved into the growing debate about water, and this past April released a book called Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America.

In an interview, he says Ms. Barlow's alarmist fears about privatization are a damaging distraction from the real issues.

"The Americans are not after our water, corporations are not a great threat to our water," Mr. Wood says. "However, 90 per cent of what happens with water happens in the marketplace, so I think it's more helpful to get corporations and business onside, rather than demonize them."

Mr. Wood says that while he's delighted at Ms. Barlow's UN appointment, he hopes she uses her position to focus on solutions, rather than further ignite anti-corporate views.

"It's the real things we have to deal with," Mr. Wood says.

Ms. Barlow is defensive of her stance, however, and says it's not an anti-privatization agenda she has but one that seeks to strike a fair balance.

"I'm not at all opposed to the private sector, I just think we need balance," Ms. Barlow says, adding that of the many places she's visited around the world, she most admires Latin America for being the first region of the developing world to reject neo-liberalism and "unfettered market capitalism."

"I think Latin America has been the first place in the world to really have that experiment imposed upon it and then through a massive grassroots movement it has rejected it, so I have a very soft spot for Latin America."

Bolivia in particular has captured Ms. Barlow's affection. As the first country to suffer a water war after a private company moved in and hiked prices for access to clean drinking water, Ms. Barlow and others joined in an international movement to help the people of Bolivia oust the company, Bechtel.

"It was so appalling that there was an uprising and the army was brought in and people were killed. It was like a war, and the people won and Bechtel was forced to leave," Ms. Barlow recalls. "It was very exciting on our part."

With so many water-related crises taking place around the world, Ms. Barlow admits she sometimes overlooks how her new appointment at the UN could be used to affect change in Canada.

"My concern is that I would like to shine the spotlight on Canada's water issues and the fact that we have been cavalier, but most particularly that our cavalier attitude has affected First Nations people," Ms. Barlow says. "It's a common story right across the country, and it's not a good story."

As such, her first project as senior water adviser will be to lobby UNESCO to declare McClelland Lake in northern Alberta a World Heritage Site. Once singled out by the Alberta government for "special protection," a discovery of a billion barrels of bitumen saw the unique wetlands quickly sold off to TrueNorth Energy.

"It's considered very, very important environmentally," Ms. Barlow says. "So it strikes me that this is going to be my first UN project, my first project to do in Canada."

Above all, Ms. Barlow says, she is determined to protect the future of water for her four young grandchildren so that they don't have to drink filthy water one day.

"It's not going to happen here right away and maybe not for a very long time, maybe not in our lifetime," she says. "But it is happening now for close to two billion people in the world everyday who don't have access to clean water."

mcollinsembassymag.ca

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