We may have heard such a phrase recently, "Water is the new oil." What I disagree with such a statement is that water is much more valuable than oil & it's so valuable, because it's that much more required to live. We can't survive couple of days without water. We definitely can live without oil.
Cruel irony is that although, the earth consists of 75% water, clean, drinking water is a tiny fraction of that 75% water mass on Earth. And, billions of $$$ have been, & still being, spent in creating weapons of mass destruction, by, none other than, developed countries, instead of developing technologies to filter that 75% of sea water.
In the midst of 4-year-long drought, California just planned to start its seawater filtration system. Although, it was developed & built the last time California went through a year-long drought, it was never used. The biggest problem with that filtration system, beside being energy-intensive, is that the salty & briny water as the by-product of the clean water it will provide. That briny water will be discarded back into the sea. If the drought continues on for long, then more & more of that seawater will be processed through that filtration system & more systems may be put on the Californian coast.
As you can imagine what will happen to the seawater when one or more of these machines keep throwing back that very salty, briny water back in it. It will disturb the delicate balance of salt & other minerals in the seawater. Besides, adversely affecting the marine life & the aquatic environment, that seawater will eventually start to turn more & more salty (ratio of salt will increase in less water). In that case, more energy will be required to filter that much water for a lot less of clean water. It's an imperfect technology, & it will only create adverse reactions later on.
It's a bandaid solution to a much larger water crisis. There are lots of these solutions going around. Another stupid solution state of Nevada came up with is building a large pipeline to transfer water from a municipality in northern Nevada to Vegas, since Hoover Dam (the primary water provider to Vegas) is quickly drying up.
Solutions are supposed to be beneficial to all, not depriving one set of humans from water, so another set can thrive. Or one set of animals (marine) die, so humans can survive. Solutions to water crisis need to be sustainable & long-lasting. That will need research & scientific collaboration. That research needs financial resources. But, governments of developed countries are putting their financial & human resources to come up with the latest breakthrough in how to kill other people (or other living beings, from animals to plants, i.e. deforestation).
Remember, more people die of preventable diseases & human-caused problems in developed countries than terrorism, foreign or domestic. For instance, per CDC, almost 35,000 people died of gun-related deaths in 2013, in US, or the fact that in North America, over 59,000 women die each year from breast cancer. That's almost 100,000 North American deaths, in North America, in only 1 year (2013) by only 2 causes of death. How many North Americans have been killed by terrorists in the past 20 years? I would suggest a number around 10,000 (civilian & military combined).
So, if all those financial resources are diverted towards preventing these unnecessary deaths in our own countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, & any number of European countries), foreign terrorists would lose their interests in trying to kill us. We don't meddle in their business & they won't meddle in us. Our problem is preventing people from carcinogenic materials in our water, food, & air. Our problem is to provide our own people with clean water.
Do I see this as a hopeless situation? Yes. Do I see humans will ever turn away & learn from their mistakes? Yes, but it will be too late by the time they come around. Water has already become a crisis. We can already see how climate change has already become a huge, world-wide, crisis, but is it stopping US from fracking & polluting clean drinking water? Did that stop the government from allowing Shell to exploit Arctic for its fossil fuel reserves? Is it stopping Canada from turning away billions of $$$ in fossil fuel investments in Alberta? Canadian government got out of Kyoto protocol & recently came up with its own set of emissions cutting targets, but investing in green economy ... oh no, that won't happen. By the way, most of the mining companies, which contributed to the contamination of water sources in South America, are Canadian.
I urge anyone who will read this post to watch the 2011 documentary, "Last Call at the Oasis." These ideas & problems are discussed in it & how, we humans, are digging our own graves by ignoring these crises, for example, this water crisis. At this point, I can only hope that influential people around the world wake up to these crises & start to do something, per their abilities, before it's too late. There is no point in regretting when you have deliberately crossed the point of no return.
By the way, as an update, on the said constitutional reform vote in El Salvador in the article (6th paragraph below), that vote was defeated on April 30th, & hence, international business interests won their right to exploit water & land for their own use. (That's why, I said above, I am much more hopeless than hopeful that we will change our situation).
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“We saw a group of strangers & asked what they were doing. When they said they were looking for mines, we told them naively that there were no landmines here,” says Felipe Tobar, the mayor of San Jose Las Flores.
This was his community’s first encounter with Aurora Mineral Resource Group, a large mining company that began exploration in the Salvadoran town in 2005. After learning that the government had permitted exploration for a gold mine without their consultation, the communities were anxious to protect their water sources from the mines. In Latin America’s most water-scarce country, 98% of fresh water is contaminated; metal mining has long been one of the contributing factors.
The villagers took matters into their own hands. They took away the markings that the prospectors had been putting into place & rebuffed company representatives. “They sent public relations people to speak to us, but each time they were escorted out by dozens of community members & eventually the company gave up,” says Tobar. For this community, as for many others in El Salvador, the need to protect water resources was far more vital than any employment that the mine might offer.
In terms of access to water, El Salvador is the third most unequal country in Latin America & the Caribbean, according to a 2010 report by the UN. But now a powerful coalition of NGOs & community groups is attempting to get access to water enshrined in law as a human right. El Foro del Agua, a water coalition of more than 100 organisations & community groups, is calling for a national ban on metal mining, a constitutional amendment recognising the human right to water, & a general water law that would legally establish social control of water resources & services. Through consultation & research with communities on the front line of the water struggle, these strategies are aimed, in part, at shifting the power dynamics to strengthen the sovereignty of the Salvadoran people to determine their own freshwater future.
Binding national laws to protect community water rights would help other local communities that have been less successful in their struggles to protect water from harmful developments. It is no small miracle that environmental strategies developed at the grassroots level have been introduced for debate at the Salvadoran legislature. Yet despite support from the ruling Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front party, opposition parties defending the interests of transnational corporations have blocked these strategies at the legislative assembly.
And now a constitutional amendment for El Salvador to recognise water & food as human rights is set to expire. In 2012, the Salvadoran legislative assembly voted unanimously in favour of the amendment. But Salvadoran law states that a vote for constitutional reform must be supported by 2 consecutive legislatures – the bill is introduced by one legislature & ratified by the following one. If the amendment is not ratified by the current legislature by 30 April 2015, it becomes void. Even if the new legislature were to reintroduce the bill, it would take another 4 to 6 years to ratify.
If passed, however, the formal recognition of water & food as human rights would provide a strong tool in the struggle to protect water in El Salvador. It would affirm the primacy of local access to water supplies & ecosystem needs over foreign interests. Although the current government has vowed to maintain a de facto moratorium on metal mining that has been in place since 2008, without binding legislation environmental groups fear that this stopgap measure will not provide the long-term water strategy the country needs.
The human right to water is increasingly serving as a tool for communities throughout the world. In Uruguay, formal recognition of the human right to water & sanitation resulted in the banning of private water & sanitation services. In Indonesia on 24 March, weeks after the constitutional court deemed a World Bank-imposed water law to be anti-constitutional for allowing the privatisation of water, the Central Jakarta District Court annulled a 17-year old private-public-partnership arguing that it violated the human right to water. As in El Salvador, campaigns in Uruguay & Indonesia were led by people’s coalitions.
“The thousands of people organising to defend water in El Salvador are writing the shared history of the continent,” says Marcela Olivera, coordinator of La Red Vida, a coalition representing groups working on water issues from across the Americas. “They are showing the world that from El Salvador & Mexico to Argentina & Uruguay, we are not only capable of resisting the neoliberal agenda, but also of building concrete alternatives.”
In the meantime, the communities of San Jose Las Flores & Nueva Trinidad are not taking any chances. They are among a growing number of municipalities in Chalatenango who are declaring themselves as territories free of mining through municipal laws. In Central America, where environmental health & public policy decisions are dominated by the interests of big (primarily Canadian) mining companies, places like Chalatenango show that it is still possible to assert local power & maintain “liberated territories”.
Meera Karunananthan is international water campaigner for the Blue Planet Project & co-author of a new report on El Salvador’s water struggles.
Cruel irony is that although, the earth consists of 75% water, clean, drinking water is a tiny fraction of that 75% water mass on Earth. And, billions of $$$ have been, & still being, spent in creating weapons of mass destruction, by, none other than, developed countries, instead of developing technologies to filter that 75% of sea water.
In the midst of 4-year-long drought, California just planned to start its seawater filtration system. Although, it was developed & built the last time California went through a year-long drought, it was never used. The biggest problem with that filtration system, beside being energy-intensive, is that the salty & briny water as the by-product of the clean water it will provide. That briny water will be discarded back into the sea. If the drought continues on for long, then more & more of that seawater will be processed through that filtration system & more systems may be put on the Californian coast.
As you can imagine what will happen to the seawater when one or more of these machines keep throwing back that very salty, briny water back in it. It will disturb the delicate balance of salt & other minerals in the seawater. Besides, adversely affecting the marine life & the aquatic environment, that seawater will eventually start to turn more & more salty (ratio of salt will increase in less water). In that case, more energy will be required to filter that much water for a lot less of clean water. It's an imperfect technology, & it will only create adverse reactions later on.
It's a bandaid solution to a much larger water crisis. There are lots of these solutions going around. Another stupid solution state of Nevada came up with is building a large pipeline to transfer water from a municipality in northern Nevada to Vegas, since Hoover Dam (the primary water provider to Vegas) is quickly drying up.
Solutions are supposed to be beneficial to all, not depriving one set of humans from water, so another set can thrive. Or one set of animals (marine) die, so humans can survive. Solutions to water crisis need to be sustainable & long-lasting. That will need research & scientific collaboration. That research needs financial resources. But, governments of developed countries are putting their financial & human resources to come up with the latest breakthrough in how to kill other people (or other living beings, from animals to plants, i.e. deforestation).
Remember, more people die of preventable diseases & human-caused problems in developed countries than terrorism, foreign or domestic. For instance, per CDC, almost 35,000 people died of gun-related deaths in 2013, in US, or the fact that in North America, over 59,000 women die each year from breast cancer. That's almost 100,000 North American deaths, in North America, in only 1 year (2013) by only 2 causes of death. How many North Americans have been killed by terrorists in the past 20 years? I would suggest a number around 10,000 (civilian & military combined).
So, if all those financial resources are diverted towards preventing these unnecessary deaths in our own countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, & any number of European countries), foreign terrorists would lose their interests in trying to kill us. We don't meddle in their business & they won't meddle in us. Our problem is preventing people from carcinogenic materials in our water, food, & air. Our problem is to provide our own people with clean water.
Do I see this as a hopeless situation? Yes. Do I see humans will ever turn away & learn from their mistakes? Yes, but it will be too late by the time they come around. Water has already become a crisis. We can already see how climate change has already become a huge, world-wide, crisis, but is it stopping US from fracking & polluting clean drinking water? Did that stop the government from allowing Shell to exploit Arctic for its fossil fuel reserves? Is it stopping Canada from turning away billions of $$$ in fossil fuel investments in Alberta? Canadian government got out of Kyoto protocol & recently came up with its own set of emissions cutting targets, but investing in green economy ... oh no, that won't happen. By the way, most of the mining companies, which contributed to the contamination of water sources in South America, are Canadian.
I urge anyone who will read this post to watch the 2011 documentary, "Last Call at the Oasis." These ideas & problems are discussed in it & how, we humans, are digging our own graves by ignoring these crises, for example, this water crisis. At this point, I can only hope that influential people around the world wake up to these crises & start to do something, per their abilities, before it's too late. There is no point in regretting when you have deliberately crossed the point of no return.
By the way, as an update, on the said constitutional reform vote in El Salvador in the article (6th paragraph below), that vote was defeated on April 30th, & hence, international business interests won their right to exploit water & land for their own use. (That's why, I said above, I am much more hopeless than hopeful that we will change our situation).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“We saw a group of strangers & asked what they were doing. When they said they were looking for mines, we told them naively that there were no landmines here,” says Felipe Tobar, the mayor of San Jose Las Flores.
This was his community’s first encounter with Aurora Mineral Resource Group, a large mining company that began exploration in the Salvadoran town in 2005. After learning that the government had permitted exploration for a gold mine without their consultation, the communities were anxious to protect their water sources from the mines. In Latin America’s most water-scarce country, 98% of fresh water is contaminated; metal mining has long been one of the contributing factors.
The villagers took matters into their own hands. They took away the markings that the prospectors had been putting into place & rebuffed company representatives. “They sent public relations people to speak to us, but each time they were escorted out by dozens of community members & eventually the company gave up,” says Tobar. For this community, as for many others in El Salvador, the need to protect water resources was far more vital than any employment that the mine might offer.
In terms of access to water, El Salvador is the third most unequal country in Latin America & the Caribbean, according to a 2010 report by the UN. But now a powerful coalition of NGOs & community groups is attempting to get access to water enshrined in law as a human right. El Foro del Agua, a water coalition of more than 100 organisations & community groups, is calling for a national ban on metal mining, a constitutional amendment recognising the human right to water, & a general water law that would legally establish social control of water resources & services. Through consultation & research with communities on the front line of the water struggle, these strategies are aimed, in part, at shifting the power dynamics to strengthen the sovereignty of the Salvadoran people to determine their own freshwater future.
Binding national laws to protect community water rights would help other local communities that have been less successful in their struggles to protect water from harmful developments. It is no small miracle that environmental strategies developed at the grassroots level have been introduced for debate at the Salvadoran legislature. Yet despite support from the ruling Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front party, opposition parties defending the interests of transnational corporations have blocked these strategies at the legislative assembly.
And now a constitutional amendment for El Salvador to recognise water & food as human rights is set to expire. In 2012, the Salvadoran legislative assembly voted unanimously in favour of the amendment. But Salvadoran law states that a vote for constitutional reform must be supported by 2 consecutive legislatures – the bill is introduced by one legislature & ratified by the following one. If the amendment is not ratified by the current legislature by 30 April 2015, it becomes void. Even if the new legislature were to reintroduce the bill, it would take another 4 to 6 years to ratify.
If passed, however, the formal recognition of water & food as human rights would provide a strong tool in the struggle to protect water in El Salvador. It would affirm the primacy of local access to water supplies & ecosystem needs over foreign interests. Although the current government has vowed to maintain a de facto moratorium on metal mining that has been in place since 2008, without binding legislation environmental groups fear that this stopgap measure will not provide the long-term water strategy the country needs.
The human right to water is increasingly serving as a tool for communities throughout the world. In Uruguay, formal recognition of the human right to water & sanitation resulted in the banning of private water & sanitation services. In Indonesia on 24 March, weeks after the constitutional court deemed a World Bank-imposed water law to be anti-constitutional for allowing the privatisation of water, the Central Jakarta District Court annulled a 17-year old private-public-partnership arguing that it violated the human right to water. As in El Salvador, campaigns in Uruguay & Indonesia were led by people’s coalitions.
“The thousands of people organising to defend water in El Salvador are writing the shared history of the continent,” says Marcela Olivera, coordinator of La Red Vida, a coalition representing groups working on water issues from across the Americas. “They are showing the world that from El Salvador & Mexico to Argentina & Uruguay, we are not only capable of resisting the neoliberal agenda, but also of building concrete alternatives.”
In the meantime, the communities of San Jose Las Flores & Nueva Trinidad are not taking any chances. They are among a growing number of municipalities in Chalatenango who are declaring themselves as territories free of mining through municipal laws. In Central America, where environmental health & public policy decisions are dominated by the interests of big (primarily Canadian) mining companies, places like Chalatenango show that it is still possible to assert local power & maintain “liberated territories”.
Meera Karunananthan is international water campaigner for the Blue Planet Project & co-author of a new report on El Salvador’s water struggles.
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