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Old 05-19-2010, 11:00 AM   #1
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Default Maude Barlow on Water: The Myth of Abundance

Maude Barlow was recently on my campus at the Chiles Center and she delivered the most amazing speech on where we stand with the issue surrounding water shortages. Her speech was titled: Water: The Myth of Abundance.

For those of you who are not acquainted with her and her activism, she is a Canadian author and activist who has been awarded 8 honorary doctorate degrees; she is the national chairperson for The Council of Canadians; she chairs the board of Washington DC based Food and Water Watch; the co-chair of Blue Planet Project; and is also an executive member of the San Francisco based International Forum on Globalization, and a councillor in Hamburg, Germany for World Future Council. She has also been a featured guest on NPR Radio news shows!

LINK
<~~ see this link for further background information on Maude Barlow.

The speech she gave has not yet been converted to DVD format and is available on YouTube in 8 sequenced videos: The first two videos I have not included here - these are introductions to her speech and you can double click on any video below, to take you to YouTube if you are interested in watching the preceding videos. I'm embedding videos 3-7 - her speech. Videos 8-11 are filmed sequences of her taking questions from the audience and expounding further as she addressed specific audience questions.

I've yet to decide what and/or where I will concentrate in my future career - but I've always been attracted to environmental issues: In the past, my focus has been on Timber because of my love for trees and how unique they are at cleansing the air and as stakeholders who have no voice in contemporary human culture.

Maudes speech set my soul on fire. I won't give away the central tenets of her speech; but I will say that I agree with her 100% that the human use of water and why the water footprint needs to come to screeching halt immediately or there won't be a life worth living in (as Maude has characterized the current situation) 5 to ten years.

Please watch her video and listen to what her message conveys. It's so important. Without water, we will die a slow death in agony. So will Trees.

With love,
~ALK

PS/ please feel free to begin a conversation if you would like and talk about things or ask questions among yourselves or leave any comments you would like to with regard to her speech. I would add this caveat: I don't know much about water rights issues or use issues or current policy in our local regions, states or at a federal level or even on a global basis; but Maude is an expert and she has devoted her life to advocate for water. I believe that in one segment of her speech she tells about how one city (a location) has named water as a human right - in order to develop effective policy to protect water sources in that particular location. I've only heard her once and I need to re-listen to her message several times. Her speech is dense and rich with a wealth of information that most people do not hear about.

Without further ado, here's Maude's speech (videos 3-7) at University of Portland's - Chiles Center!!!


A pulse of where the world is



Water, Development, and Trade



Who decides about water?



Preventing the end of water



Environmental peace-making and modern Mordor
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Old 01-13-2018, 01:12 PM   #2
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Default ***B U M P ***

Before I graduated with my Master's degree in Communication Studies at U.P., Maude Barlow was on campus to address the water crisis-- which presently still looms on the horizon.

Every single point she made in her keynote address has virtually come true.....I agree that the last bastion on earth for humans to agree to protect Water for the survival of humans on earth is to make it law that water is an human right.

Maude Barlow serves as an Water advocate in Canada and has played am critical role in helping others to realize that water is critical to survival.

-- Kätzchen--
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Old 01-13-2018, 03:05 PM   #3
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I can't thank you enough for this thread, Katzchen. I hadn't heard of Maude before, but she's most definitely now amongst the women I admire most for speaking out so clearly on this subject. If anyone reading this doubts what Maude is saying, I urge them to look up information on the Aral Sea, and see how it has changed since 1950.

I think many (most?) people just don't grasp the rapidity with which population increase, power increase, resource increase has happened with our species. Each day follows on, much like the next, why shouldn't tomorrow be much the same? Except, of course, it isn't. I became interested (and worried about) the environment back in the 1970's, and it's patly due to that that I'm on my horticulture degree course now.

Me and two of my colleagues on the course I'm on were tasked with doing a presentation on urban agritech. It was interesting seeing the reaction of my young colleagues (all in their twenties) on the salient points of our presentation; population increased from 3 billion (the year I was born) to double that by 2000, is currently in the vicinity of 7.5 billion (though the rate of increase is now slowing) and is predicted by the UN to hit around 11 billion (median estimate) by 2050.

That's a hell of a lot more extra people just since I was born, all needing and using water, power, resources. It's a heck of a lot of extra waste heat from our industries being dumped into the environment, not to mention the gaseous wastes affecting the composition and thermal properties of our atmosphere. It's a heck of a lot of extra food that's needed to feed all those extra humans too, and growing food consumes water, so we're in competition with our own food for water that we could be drinking!

Quite frankly, anyone seeing the data and able to grasp simple maths would have to be unsound of mind to carry on to think that we can carry on as we have this last few centuries. Or, possibly, sufficiently immoral to not give a damn about future generations, and happy to just take the money from their political patrons and spout arrant dangerous nonsense about the various crises that face us imminently as a species.

Yes, there are various technologies that may be able to help somewhat, from water desalination and purification methods that use very little energy, to hydroponic techniques that can produce ten times as much of certain edible crops (most not giving much in the way of calories, as yet) per unit area (but those require the construction of units that use resources and help cause other problems!). The conclusion we came to is that technology might be able to hold off a widespread crisis in food supply for ten to twenty years longer than it's liable to happen naturally, but no more than that. (incidentally, currently the world still grows sufficient food to feed everyone - the major reason that people are starving is due to our insistence on treating food as a luxury that must be purchased, rather than a human right. But we're putting the environment under severe strain growing our food the way we currently are, and coudlc ause ecosystem collapse).

The best advice I'm able to give anyone is to be as frugal with resource usage as you can, learn how to grow some form of food if you can, and for youngsters to have no more than one child per couple. for a generation or two.

Ultimately, we MUST control our numbers and behave more rationally as a species if we want anything like our 'civilisation' to continue.
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Old 01-13-2018, 04:33 PM   #4
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OOOOHHHH!! Dawn!! I've never heard of her but I am SO intrigued!

I will be watching the vids on the treadmill

Thank you for such a wonderful and interesting thread!
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Old Yesterday, 02:00 PM   #5
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Default Years later: A water news update for 2024.

Time has passed slowly since I first became acquainted with issues concerning impending water crises— locally, nationally or even at international levels of interest.

Here in the immediate area of my home state of Oregon, the ongoing fight for water resources between farmers and indigenous populations has only been reported on from the perspective of saving fish runs to certain rivers and dams (Kalamath, etc), but had we not gotten a late winter snow storm in early March, we might have drinking water issues in the metro area of our state’s largest populated areas. I know we have schools across the pdx area that still have lead pipes which contaminates fresh water supplies but that is one of many water concerns in our local area.

At a national level, I’ve lost track of former but relatively recent water issues. I know there are critical issues out there but it is not getting the press coverage it needs to warn people of the dire consequences of not taking care of our water infrastructure.

Here is a recent report I learned about originally on CNN, but investigated on my own and came up with the headline story on water troubles for those who live in Mexico.

LINK: https://water.org/our-impact/where-we-work/mexico/


Here is a few frightening details about the water crisis Mexicans face:

A) In general, millions of people do not have access to clean water.

B). In the countries’ capital, Mexico City— which has a population of 127 million, 72 million do not have access to clean water. And, 47 million do not have access to a toilet.

C). Mexico City, by summer, will not have any trickle of any water supply. They have a crippled water and crippled sanitation situation driven by extreme drought and a barren economy which leaves the Mexican population in extreme crisis because they can’t truck in clean water nor do they have a plan to get their ongoing water crises addressed by summer.


Here is an updated news report from a water agency:

https://americasquarterly.org/articl...into-politics/


I’m guessing Maude Barlow has got to be Canada’s superhero by now because years ago she helped steer Canadian interests by making sure water rights in Canada were designated as a human right so no foreign interest could claim their natural water reserves as theirs. Thereby, protecting the interests of humans who live in Canada. America has yet to adopt Canadian standards for water rights and to protect clean water sources from foreign interests. Mexico is in serious trouble with lack of clean water and sanitation services. America might be next on the horizon of the “water wars” Maude Barlow referenced years ago.
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