»The Way Forward
Blue Covenant
» According to Merriam-Webster, the word covenant is a “written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties especially for the performance of some action.”
When it comes to our drinking water, those two parties are the people and their governments. The global water crisis has brought to the surface the need for a united front between citizens of the world and those who have influence over how our water is cared for. In an effort to bring those parties together, Maude Barlow, national chairperson for the Council of Canadians, proposes a “Blue Covenant” that essentially affirms the entitlement of clean water and encourages governments to protect our water supplies. An insightful and innovative step in preserving our water supply, this pledge is one step in ensuring this basic right for all humanity.
Water for Life, Water for All
» The global drinking water crisis has a solution if humanity can find the political will. We need a “Blue Covenant” from people and their governments that recognizes the right of the earth and of other species to clean water and pledges to protect and conserve the world’s water supplies for all time. This means we must take action in four areas.
Source Protection
First, we must stop polluting our surface and groundwater sources, and we must back up this intention with strict legislation. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.” We must put a stop to the industrial toxic dumping poisoning our waterways. Legislation should also include penalties for domestic corporations that pollute in foreign countries. Water abuse in oil and methane gas production must stop. Consumers need to switch to environmentally friendly cleaning products. All sewage must be properly treated and aging infrastructure repaired. Food and Water Watch is calling for a dedicated federal Clean Water Trust Fund to rebuild infrastructure and halt the many sewage spills now leaking from aging pipes across the United States. The harm to water of industrial and chemical-based agriculture is well documented as well. Today, farmers around the world use six times more pesticides than they did 50 years ago. We need a “Blue Revolution” in agriculture to get “more crop per drop” and a cessation of the mass use of chemicals to grow food. Finally, destruction of forests and wetlands — the lungs and kidneys of our freshwater — must stop. Water does not exist in isolation from healthy ecosystems and needs forests and wetlands as much as forests and wetlands need water to survive.
Conservation
Second, we must conserve water everywhere, essentially using every drop of water twice. Household conservation methods include low-flow showerheads, dishwashers and washing machines, low-flush toilets, conversion of grass lawns to rock gardens, and capturing tap water and rainwater. Water guzzling indulgences such as back-yard swimming pools, down hill skiing (an acre of artificial snow takes as much as one million gallons of water to make) and golf (U.S. golf course irrigation consumes enough water every day to satisfy the needs of two-thirds of the American population) must be cut back. Farmers must re-learn the lessons of a sustainable food production system, which would include the use of drip irrigation instead of flood irrigation. We must say no to water-guzzling industrial bio fuel farming (which uses almost 400 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol) and is heavily subsidized by many governments. The whole system of food exports has to be measured by its effect on local water sources and virtual water trade, the water embedded in a commodity that is then exported out of the watershed. The U.S. is the biggest virtual water exporter in the world, despite the serious water shortages in many states. Every day, one-third of domestic water use is exported out of the country in commodity trading, often controlled by big agribusiness companies.
Groundwater Management
Around the world, as humans have polluted surface water, we are mining groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it. Bore well pumping is removing too much water from the stressed Great Lakes and groundwater is being pumped so hard in Florida, large sinkholes are swallowing houses and even shopping centers. The U.S. now depends on groundwater for 50 percent of daily water use and groundwater dependency is much higher in other parts of the world. Our unhealthy collective addiction to bottled water must end. Humans put 50 billion gallons (100 billion litres) of water in plastic bottles around the world last year, 95 percent of which were not recycled. Simply put, we cannot continue to mine groundwater supplies at a rate greater than natural recharge. If we do, there will not be enough water for the next generation. Extractions cannot exceed recharge just as a bank account cannot be drawn down without new deposits. Governments everywhere must undertake intensive research into their groundwater supplies and regulate groundwater takings before their underground reservoirs are gone and legislate to protect these vital water sources. In May, Vermont adopted an important groundwater protection law that extends the public trust doctrine to the state’s groundwater. No one person or company owns water any longer; rather, it belongs to all the citizens of Vermont. Furthermore, in times of shortage, there will be a water-use priority given to drinking water and food production over water for commercial purposes.
Watershed Restoration
The final vital step is the restoration of watersheds and the protection of ecosystems. Slovakian scientist Michal Kravcik and colleagues have done groundbreaking work showing that our collective abuse of water is a vital and little understood factor in climate change. They warn that, with time, our current behaviour will completely destroy the hydrologic cycle. They argue that the only solution is the massive restoration of watersheds. Bring water back into parched landscapes. Return water that has disappeared by retaining as much rainwater as possible within ecosystems so that water can permeate the soil, replenish groundwater systems and return to the atmosphere to regulate temperatures and renew the hydrologic cycle. All human, industrial and agricultural activity must conform to this imperative, a project that could also employ millions and alleviate poverty. Our cities must be ringed with green conservation zones as we restore forests and wetlands. It is necessary to create the conditions that allow rainwater to remain in local watersheds. This means restoring the natural spaces where rainwater can fall and where water can flow. Water retention can be carried out at all levels: roof gardens in family homes and office buildings; urban planning that allows rainwater to be captured and returned to the earth; water harvesting in food production; capturing daily water discharge and returning it clean to the land, not to the rising oceans. Many examples abound, such as the New Mexican “Acequia” system, which uses an ancient natural ditch irrigation tradition to distribute water. The International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance works globally to promote sustainable rainwater harvesting programs. Simply put, the water in the hydrologic cycle will provide for us forever if we care for it and allow the earth to renew it.
A New Water Narrative
For these vital steps to be taken however, we humans will have to adopt more sustainable economic and trade policies than those that currently dominate in most of the world. The tenets of economic globalization promote head-to-head nation-state competition, water-guzzling export oriented agriculture production and growth at all cost. The late American environmentalist Edward Abbey said that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell; it must turn on its host to survive. The earth’s carrying capacity is full. We cannot add more to it. It is time to give back to nature what we have taken from it. This will mean that all trade and economic policies must be tested against their impact on water and the environment and emphasis will have to be placed on more local and sustainable food production. We will likely have to reduce the virtual trade in water and ban or limit the mass movement of water out of watersheds and aquifers by pipeline.
As well, a “Blue Covenant” must include a pledge from the wealthy to the poor for water justice. Dirty water is the No. 1 killer of children around the world. Water apartheid is the single greatest symbol of a class divided world. Simply put, if their parents had money to buy clean water, these children would not be dying. Water must be seen as a human right available to all, not a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it and denied to those who cannot. What is needed now is binding law at all levels of government, including the UN, to codify that states have the obligation to deliver sufficient, safe, accessible and affordable water to their citizens as a public service. A United Nations Covenant would set the framework of water as a social and cultural asset and establish the indispensable legal groundwork for a just system of distribution. It would serve as a common, coherent body of rules for all nations and clarify that it is the role of the state to provide water to all of its citizens. Such a covenant would also safeguard already accepted human rights and environmental principles in other treaties and conventions.
A new water narrative would marry the need to protect and conserve water everywhere with the right of all people and other species to clean drinking water. Water for life, water for all — it must be so. w
