To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, Biodynamic Food and Farming Discussion <bdnow@envirolink.org>
Subject: [permaculture] For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's water-crisis - Boing Boing
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:48:23 -0400
<http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/07/for-love-of-water-in.html>
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For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's
water-crisis
Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 7, 2008 12:39 PM | permalink
I've just watched Irena Salina's incredible, infuriating documentary FLOW: For Love of Water, a film about the
often-invisible and underreported global water crisis. Ranging from widespread US contamination to the tragedy of
developing nations who are forced by the World Bank to sell their water companies like Vivendi, Suez and Thames, who get
sweetheart deals to offer substandard, overpriced monopoly water service, at terrible cost to human life.
Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria.
The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is
awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against
people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die.
In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic
than what comes out of the tap. The result is a gigantic mountain of empty plastic bottles that toxify the environment
-- and three times more money spent on bottled water than it would take to solve the world's real water crisis. The
companies like Nestle that pump out our aquifers use private investigators to harass people who sign petitions to stop
them from pumping.
But it's not all doom and gloom -- low-cost, sustainable purification technologies like ultraviolet water-health run by
village cooperatives can make dramatic development differences for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, who
are able to maintain their own systems without foreign involvement. Local activists all over the world and fighting back
and winning public, non-profit ownership of their waterworks.
The companies that control our water control our lives. Without us even noticing it, we've handed the planet's destiny
to a few companies with a plan to line their pockets by holding our survival hostage.
Flow is seeking signatures for a petition to the UN: "Article 31: Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water,
adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or
quality of water due to individual economic circumstance."
[permaculture] For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's water-crisis - Boing Boing,
Lawrence F. London, Jr., 04/08/2008