Stand Up To Corporations That Kill

The wars for water our most precious resource are predicted to be worse than any wars down through history for any other resource. This has been predicted for the last twenty years or more, yet this remains the forgotten crisis of our planet even while the amount of people without clean potable water continues to rise as the availabilty of water goes down.

Fresh water on our planet compromises less than one half of one percent of all the water available on this planet. The rest is sea water unfit for human consumption and use (unless put through the process of desalinization (which takes the salt out by various methods (more on that process in a future entry,)) with 90% of all fresh water frozen in polar ice caps (more on that also in a subsequent entry. And I did write about the exploitation of this as well in another entry regarding the Arctic thaw.) This is not a good trend for our planet as we also now face the consequences of the climate crisis that also effects the water cycle.

Consumption of water is doubling every twenty years, which is twice the rate of population growth. The repurcussions of this trend continuing at present levels for another twenty years is astounding and frightening for our future. It is not only frightening in that disease, famine, dehydration, despoiling of the environment, economic unrest, and the breakdown of social structures is what comes of it, but also and even more frightening because multi-national corporations in league with governments that care not for those who are suffering the repercussions will seek and are seeking to control this precious resource and market it as a commodity, thus perpetuating these repercussions rather than recognize that water and its use by all mankind is a HUMAN RIGHT that they should never be allowed to take away. However, once again we see human nature is all its evil glory. Greed trumping morality.

Corporations have also insinuated themselves in territorial disputes around the world including the United States, with designs to reroute supplies away from poor communities to richer communities and those customers who can afford to pay their exhorbitant blackmail prices. This in turn leaves the poor to seek out other methods of obtaining this resource which leads them to walk hours a day to collect water at a source that is polluted with toxins which in turn make them sick. They also have to contend with governments, militias, terrorists, warlords, and others seeking to take what they have collected as even though it is polluted, it is considered gold because it is so scarce. And women and children are dying simply because they dared to collect water for their families.

This is then where water wars come into play. I have been writing about this for a good five years already myself, especially in regards to the brave and wise words of Dr. Vandana Shiva, a woman who has long been fighting this attack upon the poor in India by corporations and others who seek to control a human right. Her book Water Wars clearly lays out the truth about the exploitation by corporations and the various socio-economic repercussions and human rights abuses that result from this assault on those less fortunate.

And corporations such as Bechtel, ENRON, Suez, Nestle, Coca Cola, and a host of others are backed by the World Bank which encourages privatization of this resource for their own benefit, even though the UN declared that water is a human right. And they are also using the scarcity of this resource for their own benefit in seeking to control its sources to market it as a commodity that is traded like any other commodity when it is not such. And it is killing people.

I then came across this organization in my travels and wanted to share it with you:

Blue Planet Project

This organization based in Canada seeks to empower and support people, and hold accountable those who do not recognize that water is a human right, and to deny anyone this precious resource is a human rights abuse as life cannot be sustained without it. They have activists across the globe who seek to work together to make sure that this precious resource is not exploited for the benefit of the few rich over the many. Please read this site and the work they do, and consider joining their cause.

This site allows you to endorse their work.

Blue Gold

This is the link to a tremendously comprehensive report on the entire global water issue entitled, Blue Gold, published in 2001 by Maude Barlow, National Chairperson, Council of Canadians and Chair of IFG Committee on the Globalization of Water. Anything you may wish to know about this crisis is covered in this 67 page report.

This is a must read for anyone who is as concerned about this issue as I am. I hope reading it inspires you to action, whether it be joining this site, supporting Water Partners International in their work, or simply working in your own way to educate yourself about the pervasive attack by corporations against this most precious resource that belongs to us and standing up to it.

In other entries on this topic I have posted sites and information regarding corporate takeover of water and the privatization of it that is leading this world to war. They did it with oil, they do it with everything they think can bring them profit. We cannot allow them to get away with doing it regarding something that is inherently the right of all people to use regardless of race, class, or creed.

This is the moral challenge of our time. This is the forgotten crisis of our planet that has now become so pervasive it can no longer be ignored.

WATER IS LIFE. WATER IS SACRED. WATER IS OUR LINK TO EARTH.

If we cannot respect it and stand up for our Earth, we then betray our very existence. Let us show those who seek to bring us to that point, that they will not succeed.
Thank you.