Week 8

After reading the passages from Shiva's "Water Wars", I feel profoundly remorseful about my lack of awareness and for engaging and continuing to engage in a nonsustainable lifestyle. What the articles described was greed as manifested in the actions of large corporations and supposedly helpful entities such as the World Bank. These actions, under the guise of efficiency, strip the indigenous populations of their rights to clean water and pull water out of the ground in excess of the environment's ability to replentish it. Simultaneously, money is funneled out of the country and into corporate coffers. Large companies are investing heavily in aquaculture, hoping to corner the world's supply of water. One expert was quoted as saying that water's "uniqueness" does not hold up under analyis - it is merely another commodity. On the contrary, says Shiva, water is the one commodity for which there is no alternative. While indigenous water practices have sustained communities and ecosystems for hundreds of years, it would seem that greedy individuals would rather the entire world pay for water.

This discussion relates to that of the previous week - utopia. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a community in which drinking water was a right and where no one went thirsty? The idea of community-run, sustainable water management is utopic, but, as Shiva notes, was a reality for many years in small villages before environmentally harmful companies interfered.

While the root of all problems is greed, a sub-problem where water is concerned appears to be urbanization. Cities suck up water (as we can see by the very real water war in which Los Angeles drained Mono Lake), and use it unsustainably. Villages use it far more wisely, but villages are not profitable and generally do not generate excess revenue, as they use it all to sustain the village.

What can we do about the privatization of water and the stripping of water rights from indigenous communities? The only path I see, short of miraculously curing corporate greed, is participating as much as possible in politics with the goal of creating new laws that curtail (and hopefully stop) the destructive actions that cause water shortages. As citizens, we are obligated to participate on behalf of our collective well-being. If we do not participate, we become denizens, those who inhabit but who do not contribute. If I had the resources, I'd do what I'm proposing for my project: create a law that compels people to vote. Then, I'd distribute information about water privatization. Hopefully, people will read the information and vote accordingly.