Tag: Maude Barlow

World Renowned Water Activist, Maude Barlow, to Speak on Regional Water Issues in Detroit

Published on June 4th, 2024 by - Reports & Media Releases

Click here to view and download the press release as a PDF.

May 14, 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Liz Kirkwoood, Executive Director

231 944 1568 or liz@flowforwater.org

World Renowned Water Activist, Maude Barlow, to Speak on Regional Water Issues in Detroit

Detroit, Mich. – On Thursday, May 22 at 6:30 p.m. the People’s Water Board Coalition will partner with Wayne State University’s Office of Sustainability to host a special discussion on regional Great Lakes water issues and public trust with Maude Barlow.

Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and chairs the board of the national consumer advocacy organization Food & Water Watch. Barlow is the recipient of eleven honorary doctorates as well as many awards, including the 2005 Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”), the Citation of Lifetime Achievement at the 2008 Canadian Environment Awards, and the 2009 Earth Day Canada Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. She is also the best-selling author or co-author of 17 books.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) recently announced its plan to shut-off water at thousands of Detroit residences. At the same time Detroit’s Emergency Financial Manager, Kevyn Orr, has announced his intention to privatize DWSD, the drinking water provider for roughly four-million people in southeast Michigan. This event will highlight the benefits of protecting our water systems from private interests, and why public control is the key to ensuring safe, clean, affordable water for all.

Barlow will be available after the event to sign copies of her new book Blue Future.

This event is free and open to the public.

Who:  People’s Water Board Coalition

Speakers: Maude Barlow, Council of Canadians; Jim Olson, Founder, President and Advisor of FLOW (For Love of Water); others to be announced.

When: Thursday, May 22, 2014, Doors at 6:00 p.m. Program 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Where: Marvin I. Danto Engineering Development Center
5050 Anthony Wayne Drive
Engineering Development Center (EDC)
Auditorium, Room 1507,
Detroit, MI  48202

Parking: Parking Structure 2 – 5150 Lodge Service Drive, Detroit, MI 48202

The cost is $6.50. There is also metered 2-hour parking located on the street. The cost for 2 hours is $2 at a meter.

The People’s Water Board includes: AFSCME Local 207, Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Detroit Green Party, East Michigan Environmental Action Council, Food & Water Watch, FLOW, Great Lakes Bioneers Detroit, Matrix Theater, Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, Sierra Club and Voices for Earth Justice.

# # #

FLOW is the Great Lakes Basin’s only public trust policy and education 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our mission is to advance public trust solutions to save the Great Lakes.

Great-Lakes-tabloid-Detroit

Water cut offs in Detroit a violation of human rights

Published on June 4th, 2024 by - H2Olson, News

By Guest Blogger Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of the Canadians and longtime partner of FLOW.
Read the original post here.

Maude Barlow Detroit MI Great Lakes

Maude Barlow speaks in Detroit, MI

I recently visited Detroit, Michigan and am shocked and deeply disturbed at what I witnessed. I went as part of a Great Lakes project where a number of communities and organizations around the basin are calling for citizens to come together to protect the Great Lakes as a Lived Commons, a Public Trust and a Protected Bioregion. We are also deeply worried about the threat of extreme energy such as diluted bitumen from the tar sands of Alberta and fracked oil and fracking wastewater from North Dakota being transported by pipeline and rail near the lakes and on barges on the lakes and are calling for a ban of these dangerous toxins around and on the Great Lakes.

But the people of Detroit face another sinister enemy. Every day, thousands of them, in a city that is situated right by a body of water carrying one fifth of the world’s water supply, are having their water ruthlessly cut off by men working for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. Most of the residents are African American and two thirds of the cut offs involve children, which means that in some cases, child welfare authorities are moving in to remove children from their homes as it is a requirement that there be working utilities in all homes housing children.

People are given no warning and no time to fill buckets, sinks and tubs. Sick people are left without running water and running toilets. People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook. Is this a small number of victims? No. The water department has decreed that it will turn the water off to all 120,000 residences that owe it money by the end of the summer although it has made no such threat to the many corporations and institutions that are in arrears on their bills as well. How did it come to this?

Detroit is a victim of decades of market driven neoliberal policy that put business and profit ahead of public good. Social security programs have been slashed and their delivery privatized. Investment in essential infrastructure has been slashed. Every winter, hundreds of aging pipes spew water from leaks and the water has not been turned off in thousands of abandoned houses and boarded up businesses where frozen pipes also lose huge amounts of water.

With globalization and the hollowing out of the once mighty auto industry, wealth and businesses fled to he suburbs, draining the city of its tax base and the water department of its revenues. (There are one million fewer people living in Detroit than there were in the 1950s.)

The burden of paying for the water and sewer services landed squarely on those who stayed, mostly poor African Americans. Rates rose 119% in a decade in a city with record high unemployment and a 40% poverty rate.

To make matters worse, as a cost cutting measure, the water department stopped sending bills, expecting residents to just figure out their own bills. It then installed “smart metres” that read backwards and many families were hit with bills in the thousands of dollars. Many of these bills were from former tenants, and many included water bills from near by abandoned houses but that didn’t matter to the authorities.

Recently, the city of Detroit was declared bankrupt by the state and a high priced bankruptcy lawyer was named Emergency Manager with a mandate to get the city back on its feet financially. Nothing is off the chopping block, not the city’s famous art collection or its water utilities which are about to be privatized. As the feisty Charity Hicks, a leader of the resistance to the cuts and a founding member of the Detroit People’s Water Board, which includes welfare and human rights groups and environmentalists, points out, authorities see these unpaid bills as a “bad debt” and want to sweeten the pot for a private buyer. Hence the rush to implement a ruthless plan of cut offs for anyone more than two months behind in payments.

It is important to acknowledge the class and race dimension of this assault. There have been no stories on the cut offs in the mainstream US media. One cannot imagine that fact if the people losing their water were middle class white people. But the feeling is that Detroit is a lost cause and the people there deserve what they are getting.

L Brooks Patterson is the elected CEO of the affluent Detroit suburb of Oakland. In a recent interview in the New Yorker, he affirmed that a statement he had made 30 years ago was still valid. “A number of years ago I made a prediction and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a wall around it and then throw in blankets and corn.'”

This man wins his elections with huge majorities.

What is happening in Detroit is a social crime and a violation of the human right to water and sanitation as recognized by the United Nations. It is a violation of the “Obligation to Respect,” whereby a right once realized cannot be removed.

The situation in Detroit is a travesty and the governments of Michigan and the United States itself must be held accountable.

President Obama must step in.

As more and more of the public space is privatized and sold off to corporations, is this our collective future? Never before have the differences between the 1% and the poor been greater in America.

The daily cut offs of water in Detroit, water needed for life and dignity, are an affront to the notion that we have advanced very far in our understanding of human rights or in its practice. We all stand guilty if we do not shout out against this terrible injustice on our continent.

Rochester groups are Protecting the Great Lakes Forever

Published on June 4th, 2024 by - H2Olson, News

Guest Blogger and FLOW Board Member Emma Lui is the Water Campaign Director for the Council of Canadians. She shared her recent blog post with us about Maude Barlow’s speaking engagement in Rochester, NY.

I just got home from an incredible event in Rochester, New York, the fourth Great Lakes tour stop. Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of Canadians, has been touring around the Great Lakes speaking out about threats to the Great Lakes and what we need to do to stop them once and for all. We began the Great Lakes tour last year where we visited eight cities and continued the tour this year with events already in Duluth, Milwaukee and Grand Rapids.

Wayne Howard, Linda Isaacson Fedele, Kate Kremer and Peter Debes of Rochester Sierra Club, Eric and Jim Olson from FLOW for water along with the support of Cool Rochester, Monroe Community College and Rochester Institute of Technology, did an incredible job organizing an thought-provoking and inspiring event.

On Thursday night Maude gave a riveting talk to a captivated audience of 300 about the serious threats plaguing the Great Lakes including fracking, pollution, low water levels and inequitable extraction. Recognizing the amazing work that groups have been doing to protect the lakes for decades, she outlined a needed shift in decision and policy making around the Great Lakes and outlined a framework on how to effectively address the threats to Great Lakes, so we’re not simply fighting one fight after another.

maude barlow photo from Rochester, NY

Barlow addresses the audience in Rochester, NY

Maude put forward a vision of the Great Lakes that protects a community’s right to say ‘no’ to projects harmful to water sources, incorporates community input into decision making and prioritize communities’ rights to water over private interests. These ideas form the basis of the notion that the Great Lakes are a commons and public trust. The notion of the commons, a very old concept, states that certain resources – such and air and water – are shared resources which people within a community have the collective obligation to protect. The public trust doctrine outlines governments’ obligations to protect these shared resources for community use from private exploitation.

After Maude’s talk, she was joined by Jim Olson from FLOW, Roger Downs from Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter and David Klein from the Nature Conservancy for an engaging panel discussion and to answer the audience’s questions. Jim Olson, an expert in the public trust doctrine, stressed that private rights cannot subordinate public rights.

Rochester was an important community to host a tour stop because of the water issues they’re facing. There are plans to ship fresh water by train from the region for fracking projects in Pennsylvania. Mountain Glacier, a subsidary of Nestle, is bottling water from Lake Hemlock as well as the municipality’s water. Similar to what happened in Niagara Falls, there is talk about the possibility of Monroe County, which Rochester is a part of, treating fracking wastewater.

Activists share knowledge and ideas

New York anti-fracking activists share knowledge and ideas at the NY forum

Communities in New York state are incredibly active in the fight to protect water sources, public health and the environment against fracking. With approximately 200 municipal resolutions, New York state has by far the most resolutions on fracking in the US. Community groups and fracking coalitions have been successful in keeping a moratorium on fracking in New York state where delays in a health study are stalling Governor Cuomo’s already delayed decision on whether to lift or continue the moratorium. There have been recent calls for the environmental impact assessment to be scrapped because of Ecology and Environment and other consultations links to the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York.

Yesterday morning Maude and Jim outlined the principles of the commons and public trust respectively and set the context for the day-long workshop where 50 engaged participants applied them to local issues. I gave short presentation of examples of our work on the commons and public trust. An ongoing case with Nestle, of which we’re parties to, is an exciting opportunity for the public trust doctrine to be recognized by the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal. I also talked about two municipal resolutions in Burnaby and Niagara-on-the-Lake that respectively recognize water as a commons and the Great Lakes are a shared commons and public trust.

I am heartened and inspired by the enthusiasm and openness of the people we met in Rochester to embrace the needed shift in the framework governing the Great Lakes, one that will rightfully prioritize the protection of the lakes above all else. With many governments failing to protect community watersheds, the commons and public trust principles are crucial to changing people’s relationships to water to one of responsibility and stewardship and holding our governments to account so they protect water sources for today’s and future generations. People within communities like Rochester are the catalysts for this change and it is them that I place my faith and hope that we will save the Great Lakes.

Bayfield: A community full of inspiring stewards of the Great Lakes

Published on June 4th, 2024 by - H2Olson, News

By Guest Blogger and FLOW Board Member, Emma Lui, Council of Canadians Water Campaigner.
Read the original post here.

Maude Barlow and I arrived in Bayfield, Ontario, the 15th stop of the Great Lakes Need Great Friends tour, on Friday evening. It is a beautiful village and Main Street is full of quaint, cozy and independent restaurants, inns, café’s, art galleries and stores.

Maude speaking in Bayfield ON Sept 2013Maude was invited by the Bayfield River Valley Trail Association, a group of dedicated volunteers that establish and maintain trails in the area.

A reception was held Friday evening with fellow water activists, conservationists, environmentalists and people who simply love the Great Lakes. On Saturday, Roger and Pat Lewington of the Trail Association invited Maude, Environmental Defence’s Nancy Goucher and Alanna Scott and I for a boat ride on the beautiful waters of Lake Huron. In the afternoon, we joined others for an Urban Pole Walk on the Saw Mill Trail to raise funds for the Alexandra Marine and General Hospital Foundation. There was also an art show and silent auction showcasing the talent of local artists.

madue with lower water levels in Bayfield ON Sept 2013 It didn’t take long to see the strong sense of community that Bayfield has. Roger explained how the community members are always helping each other out. And volunteers of the Trail Association understand the connection between protecting the trails and local waters and Great Lakes issues.

Bayfield is smack in the middle of Chemical Valley in Aamjiwnaang First Nation and Sarnia and the proposed nuclear waste dumps in Saugeen Shores and Kincardine. Bayfield is also faced with agricultural run-off, E. coli and drastically low water levels that plague much of Lake Huron’s communities. See Maude in the picture to the right where the wall behind her marks the receding lake levels in Bayfield.

The Saturday evening event was sold out and the Town Hall where the event was held was jam packed. The Town Hall is a beautiful old building that was saved by locals years back from being destroyed.

Maude gave an inspiring speech to a fully engaged crowd. She warned the audience that “we are a world running out of water” and talked about the “vicious new threats” to the Great Lakes are fracking and pipelines carrying tar sands and fracked oil and gas. Maude stressed the need for a new water ethic where water is at the centre of all policy including trade, economics, the environment and health, which she outlines in her new book Blue Future released Saturday night.

Bayfield ON Audience for maude sept 2013
Some ways of protecting the Great Lakes include helping to stop Line 67 that would carry bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to Lake Superior, urging Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne to stop a pipeline project that would bring fracked gas from the Marcellus shale to Toronto, calling for a moratorium on fracking in Ontario and the Great Lakes and making Great Lakes communities Blue Communities.

 
Bayfield’s beaches and marina have their Blue Flag label. The Trail Association volunteers and others have been asking Mayor Bill Dowson for many years to ban bottled water as well as recognize the human right to water and promote public water services in order to become a Blue Community. After attending Maude’s talk on Saturday, we hope Mayor Dowson will consider making the town of Bluewater, which the village of Bayfield belongs to, a Blue Community.

Congratulations to Ray and Paula Letheren, Roger and Pat Lewington and the other volunteers of the Trail Association for organizing such an amazing event and for all the fantastic work they do to protect the Great Lakes. They are an inspiring example of what it means to be stewards of the Great Lakes.

The Geography of Hope Is Anchored in Our Precious Great Lakes

Published on April 18th, 2022 by - Blog Posts, News

Photo of Maude Barlow by Michelle Valberg.

As the 53rd Earth Day approaches, it is difficult for some to look optimistically to the future. Accelerating climate change, microplastics fouling oceans and the Great Lakes, our stubborn reliance on fossil fuels, and a governance system resistant to the holistic environmental reforms we need are only a few of our worries.

But hope is more critical than ever—and two famous environmental leaders are sources of optimism.  

In his 1960 Wilderness Letter, conservationist and author Wallace Stegner famously coined the phrase “geography of hope,” referring to the impulse that led Americans to the wilderness idea.

Now, in 2022, comes another prophet of hope, Maude Barlow. A lifelong and world-renowned champion of water, Maude has authored a book built on her career of activism. Its title, appropriately, is Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism.

“Hope often defies logic and gives us the strength to continue when all the ‘facts’ tell us things are hopeless,” Maude writes. “Hope helps us to put one foot in front of the other when despair would tell us not to move.” If, after decades of advocacy, Maude can remain hopeful, surely we who have not carried such burdens can do so also.

In the book, Maude tells stories of her work on many issues, perhaps most importantly her successful advocacy of water as a human right. Resisted by many governments, this idea faced enormous challenges, but in July of 2010, the work of Maude and allies resulted in a declaration of the human right to water by the United Nations General Assembly. The vote was 122 nations in favor, with 41 abstentions—no nation voted against the resolution.

“Hope often defies logic and gives us the strength to continue when all the ‘facts’ tell us things are hopeless,” Maude writes. “Hope helps us to put one foot in front of the other when despair would tell us not to move.” If, after decades of advocacy, Maude can remain hopeful, surely we who have not carried such burdens can do so also.

Save the Date: FLOW will host a livestream book event featuring Maude Barlow on Wednesday, June 15, from 6 to 7 p.m. Eastern. Registration information coming soon.

In this part of the world, our geography of hope is anchored in the Great Lakes. Despite centuries of neglect and abuse since European settlement began, these lakes remain majestic, a source of inspiration and wonder. We can do better for them, and I know we (FLOW and you) will do so.

We can’t afford to lose hope. Many reasons for hope persist. On Earth Day 2022, let’s make a vow of hope, and remain undaunted by the challenges we face.

Maude Barlow Reflects: ‘The Goal of Our Movement Is Clean, Safe, Public Water for Everyone’

Published on September 1st, 2021 by - Blog Posts, News

“The goal of our movement is clean, safe, public water for everyone. Water is a human right. Water is a public trust. Water is a public service. It mustn’t be put on the open market like oil and gas or running shoes,” said Maude Barlow—a Canadian author and activist and board chair of Food & Water Watch—in this testimonial about the impact we’ve had during the past decade. During 2021, our 10th anniversary year, FLOW staff, supporters and collaborators are sharing reflections on what our work together has meant to them and to the freshwaters of the Great Lakes Basin.

Watch Maude Barlow’s FLOW testimonial below.

“FLOW has stayed so clearly focused on the right issues, with the right language and the right values. FLOW has the answers. They’re also lovely people. They people at FLOW are professional, but they’re always nice. They’re kind. They don’t take credit. They give credit to others. They play nice with others. They want to work in networks and teams. They know that we can do better when we work together. I would say that FLOW has an impact and punches way higher than its weight.”

“Without FLOW the Line 5 issue would not be alive in Canada. With the help of Liz’s leadership we have been able to put together a coalition here in Canada to start speaking up and start saying ‘It is a pipeline, for heaven sake. We’re against all the other pipelines, why are we being so quiet on this one?’ And this one is triply dangerous because it goes under a portion of the Great Lakes.”

“We’ve been blessed, as Canada and the United States have, with an abundance of clean water, which we’re destroying as fast as we possibly can. We have a responsibility to care for it, because this is a planet running out of clean, accessible water. We’d better take care of it.”

“I started to realize that the water is dividing into people who have access to all the water they don’t even need but want, and those who don’t. The more I did on this issue of water, the more I realized that it’s very much a women’s issue in the global south. Women who walk kilometers or miles every day. They take their girl children out of school.”

Reality Check: Line 5 Threatens More Jobs Than It Sustains

Published on March 18th, 2021 by - Blog Posts, News

By Maude Barlow and Jim Olson

Jim Olson

Maude Barlow

Editor’s note: This opinion piece appeared originally in Canada’s National Observer.

The United States and Canada are not only close friends and neighbours, but are also committed to resolving their differences with civility and common purpose. The 112-year-old International Joint Commission (IJC), which prevents and resolves disputes over boundary waters, is an example of this special relationship. So is the groundbreaking agreement among Ontario, Quebec and the eight Great Lakes states to ban water diversions from these shared and treasured waters.

The two nations, however, are clashing over energy policy and the effects of Line 5, the Canadian petroleum pipelines in the open waters of the Straits of Mackinac, a major shipping lane and important whitefish spawning ground where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron. If both Canada and the U.S. take a hard look at these issues together, they will swiftly realize that co-operation, not confrontation, is in the best interests of both — and, significantly, the interests of the planet.

The current discord between the two nations is over the decision in November by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to exercise her state’s sovereign constitutional authority to revoke the 68-year-old easement that Enbridge has relied upon to transport petroleum by pipeline from Alberta to Sarnia, Ont., across the public bottomlands of the straits separating Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.

The governor took this action in light of the clear and present danger from Enbridge’s appalling track record of easement violations in operating Line 5, including lake-bed erosion undermining support of the dual pipelines in the fierce currents where Lake Michigan meets with Lake Huron. Enbridge also lacks adequate liability insurance and has steadfastly refused to provide any of the financial assurances that Gov. Whitmer has demanded.

Enbridge knew at least 20 years ago that the original design of the Straits of Mackinac pipelines was failing. Year after year, the company quietly sought approval from the state of Michigan to shore up the pipeline, passed off as “repairs,” by installing supports — now 228 of them — in effect lifting about three miles of the dual pipelines into the water column. Government officials, however, never required Enbridge to get approval for such a radical change that poses a whole set of new and serious risks.

Then, as if fate were sounding a warning alarm, a 12,000-pound anchor from a passing vessel struck and dented the twin pipelines on April 1, 2018. Last summer, Enbridge disclosed two more strikes by anchors or cables. These foreseeable accidents could have opened a gash in the pipeline, exposing 700 hundred miles of the Great Lakes shoreline — potentially including those of Georgian Bay — to a catastrophic spill costing $6 billion in economic damages to tourism, drinking water and other interests. Even worse, such a spill could trigger a domino effect of damage disrupting Great Lakes commercial shipping and steel production, slashing jobs and shrinking the U.S.’s gross domestic product by $45 billion after just 15 days. Michigan will lose tens of thousands of jobs if Line 5 ruptures.

Many families, communities, tribes and businesses understandably are skeptical of Enbridge’s safety assurances. Enbridge calls Line 5 “as good as new” and says it can last “forever,” even though Line 5 has failed at least 33 times since 1968, spilling more than 1.1 million gallons of oil in Michigan and Wisconsin. In 2010, the company was the culprit in one of the largest petroleum spills in U.S. history. A leak in an Enbridge pipeline in southwest Michigan dumped 1.2 million gallons of heavy tarsands oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed, harming human health and damaging fish and wildlife habitat. The spill cost Enbridge over $1 billion to clean up to the extent possible. The U.S. agency that investigated the spill likened the Enbridge response to the spill to the “Keystone Kops” and cited “pervasive organizational failures at Enbridge.”

Many Canadians are concerned about the possible distortion of their energy supply. They shouldn’t be. Available capacity and flexibility to meet energy demand in the Great Lakes region already exists in the North American energy pipeline system operated by Enbridge and its competitors without threatening our public waters and the economy, according to experts from the Great Lakes protection group FLOW. They argue that when Line 5 shuts down, regional domestic energy needs and supplies for refineries will still be able to be met. The estimated increased cost to consumers would be a fraction of a cent per gallon of gasoline, according to a study commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation.

The threat to the Great Lakes, both U.S. and Canadian waters, is clear. Equally clear is the risk to the planet of another 99 years of transporting carbon-rich petroleum from the Prairies to Sarnia for refining and ultimately releasing massive carbon dioxide emissions. Government promises of a new commitment to action on climate change are hollow if Line 5 continues operation indefinitely.

The law in the U.S. and Canada recognizes the waters of the Great Lakes are held in trust to be managed by the governments as guardians for navigation, fishing and other paramount needs of citizens. Unfortunately, the Canadian and Ontario governments have joined forces with Enbridge to forsake this guardianship by pressuring Gov. Whitmer. As the company spends resources on a slick public relations campaign exaggerating the benefits of Line 5 to the U.S. while neglecting to mention its history of environmental negligence, the governments dispute Michigan’s concerns about a Great Lakes spill.

In 2016, the IJC urged governments in the Great Lakes region to adopt the public trust doctrine as a legal backstop to assure the majesty of the lakes and bottomlands is not impaired. The IJC recommendation makes sense for present and future generations. If Canada and the U.S. do so, they will inevitably support decommissioning of Line 5.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

About the Authors: Maude Barlow is an activist who served as an adviser on water to the United Nations and is Chancellor of Brescia University College. Her latest book is, “Whose Water Is It Anyway? Taking Water Protection Into Public Hands.” Jim Olson is founder and president of FLOW (For Love of Water) in Traverse City, Mich.

Safeguarding and Reclaiming the Public Water Commons and a Human Right to Water and Health

Published on January 15th, 2020 by - Blog Posts, H2Olson, News

Jim Olson is FLOW’s Founder, President, and Legal Advisor

Maude Barlow’s latest, “Whose Water Is It Anyway” is hot off the press

Photo courtesy Council of Canadians

By Jim Olson

It took me just a few hours to finish reading Maude Barlow’s incisive, inspiring new book, Whose Water Is It Anyway?: Taking Water Protection into Public Hands (ECW Press, 2019). This is not new territory for Maude.  She’s a world water policy guru and activist for the protection of the human right to water, the war against the schemes by the corporate elite to privatize and control water, and the fight to sustain water’s integrity in the watersheds where it flows. In 2002, she published Blue Gold with Tony Clark to go after global corporate thefts of water by taking over public water supplies or selling off public water in bottles. In 2007, she released Blue Covenant, enshrining the inherent obligation to assure the human right to water for people’s access to affordable safe water for all; and in 2015, she wrote Blue Future: Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever, in which she not only championed the human right to water, but called on governments and people to recognize the duty to care for the water on which the right to water and all life depends.

Her new book, Whose Water Is It Anyway, a convenient pocket-sized paperback, tells the story behind her life’s work. It was ignited when in the 1980s she glimpsed the under-the table hand of a widespread corporate scheme to parade as champions of the free market that would provide water to meet the needs of people everywhere. The scheme was actually to control the world’s sources and delivery systems of water. Her new book combines her story and the stories of many others facing blows from the corporate world order that cut off drinking water, metered the wells of peasants, or robbed residents and watersheds of the flow of freshwater to convert water into bottles at publicly subsidized massive private gain.

She hits the highs and lows—the death of a young man in Bolivia over a corporate takeover of the water of the peasants of Cochabamba, the conversion by Nestlé and other bottled water companies of the right to use water into the right to sell water on the private market at exorbitant profits. Then she traces the global awareness and growing movement that in the past 30 years has spread throughout the world, and raised a shield against the private ownership and ironfisted clench on the world’s water taps. Her story could have ended in 2010, when her life’s work, and the work of water warriors around the world—including the Blue Planet Project, Council of Canadians, Food and Water Watch, and Uruguay’s National Commission for the Defense of Water—culminated a decade of dedicated work to finally see the United Nations enact resolutions in 2010 declaring the Human Right to Water and Sanitation.

It would have been enough for Maude to tell this story, in a digestible, accessible paperback, but that wasn’t enough. Everything she writes is about her life, the conflicts over water, and the many unsung heroes on the front lines, which highlight the water crisis we face through privatization and waste of our most precious commons. The work is not done, the awareness and movement should be as much a part of quality of life, health, and dignity, and life itself. No, it wasn’t enough to stop with the success, but to chart the next steps she sees as essential, ones that are already taking root across the world—Blue Communities.

The Blue Communities movement is a citizen, grassroots, local movement that shifts the understanding of the sustainability of a community, its quality of life and economy on three basic principles: 1. Water is a commons in which everyone has a human right for drinking, health, and safety; 2. Water, including local public water infrastructure, is public, and must forever remain a commons, preserved for present and generations to come—a commons held in public trust, as FLOW has envisioned and worked for over the past 10 years; and 3. that natural water sources—our streams and lakes and groundwater—shall not be privatized by ownership or control, and public water should not be taken for free as bottled water, or the private takeover and control of access to public water supplies and infrastructure. Each local city or local rural government in the Blue Communities program adopts a resolution centering itself and its future on sustaining water for life, water that is public, a commons, safe, and accessible, common and secure for all. Already, cities in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Great Britain, and the United States have turned to resolutions and specific actions to commit to the Blue Community principles. The World Council of Churches, representing 590 million Christians, has declared itself a Blue Community.

Maude’s book is a combination of big picture world water crisis, personal story, water policy, conflicts, and solution. Here is a short readable book, a book you can slip into your purse, backpack, or even suit coat pocket, to take with you into the city hall, the boardroom, the classroom, or statehouse. It’s a story that should be read by everyone who cares about liberty, dignity, harmony, and the common good of people and planet. Here’s an author who walks the walk and helps show us the way forward. For further information on Blue Communities, water commons, privatization, and the public trust doctrine, visit The Council of Canadians or FLOW’s OUR20 Communities page.

Hot Off the Presses: Keeping Water Public and the World from Burning

Published on October 16th, 2019 by - Blog Posts, News

Jim Olson is FLOW’s Founder, President, and Legal Advisor

By Jim Olson

I just finished immersing myself in global public-water activist Maude Barlow’s incisive new book, Whose Water Is It Anyway?: Taking Water Protection into Public Hands (ECW Press, 2019).  Thanks to Maude and the publisher, I received an advance copy a few weeks ago on the promise of a book review, which remains a work-in-progress for next week.

But first, I couldn’t wait to share this article about the Vancouver Writers Fest and its feted authors Barlow, Canada’s leading world water leader, activist, and author of 19 books, and, then, Naomi Klein, equally visionary environmental, climate change, and green activist and writer.

Why my urgency to spread this coverage? Because the Vancouver Writers Fest has captured  the urgency of the moment due to the changing climate and its implications for the future control of, and human right to, water.

It is notable that the famed fiction writers’ conference has elevated these two nonfiction writers, whose works herald the citizens of the world to leave the past, become fearlessly engaged in life, not accumulation and consumerism, and halt the privatization of the world’s water.

Those of you who follow FLOW’s Facebook page understand that water is public and held in trust for the benefit of citizens, that privatization is not only morally wrong, but also that when it comes to our public water, schemes to privatize water are, and should be declared, legally and constitutionally prohibited.

Thanks to Maude Barlow, Meera Karunananthan, Emma Lui at the Council of Canadians, the Blue Planet Project, the World Social Forum, and the dedication of so many other individuals and organizations, the United Nations in 2010 declared in successive resolutions that water is a human right. Barlow tells this quiet, heroic story in her new, Whose Water Is It Anyway? It’s a story that should be read by everyone who cares about liberty, dignity, harmony, and the common good of people and planet.

But the deeper, highly readable story she tells is of her own personal journey, and those of others, in a fierce dedication against private control of water on the planet—privatization—everywhere in now in ways both commonplace (for example, Nestlé’s extraction of public groundwater and spring water for billions of dollars in bottled water profit) and extraordinary (e.g. Bechtel’s attempted takeover of Bolivia’s water).

Then there is Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon and Schuster, 2019), a book that calls on all of us to step into the future now, by giving up rampant material consumerism that is killing the planet, and lighting the fire of a movement that turns on-end our gorging ourselves on the planet and each other—a movement in which we turn to each other and what is good for the planet. 

Preachy? Not really. I’d call it a practical, common sense call to action for all of us to join in the creation by FLOW and the Council of Canadians of “Blue Communities”  that put water first as if our lives depended on it: Good for all of us, especially children and grandchildren everywhere who will be facing the turmoil and dangers of an over-heating planet in 30 years from now.

So, read the article, and, yes, pick up a copy of these two books! Then take action, because these two authors help show the way. And dive into FLOW’s website for further insight and guidance on how to keep public water in public hands, and steep yourself in FLOW’s mission to defeat privatization and protect water as a commons through the public trust doctrine.

Barlow raises Detroit water shutoffs on CBC National and in The New York Times

Published on July 9th, 2014 by - H2Olson

CBC National news reports, “Nearly half of Detroit’s water customers are in arrears so the city is disconnecting service at an unprecedented pace. 12,500 in the last 90 days though some have paid up to get their water back. …A group here in Canada has taken up the cause. The Council of Canadians helped launched a formal complaint against Detroit’s water department to the United Nations. Three UN experts agreed saying for those who cannot pay denying access to water is a human rights violation. Barlow also plans to take this matter to the White House.”

In that CBC news report, Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow says, “It’s as clear a human rights abuse as I’ve seen even in very poor countries. In my opinion it’s a social crime and it’s an appalling thing to do in the heat of summer.”

Additionally, the New York Times reports today, “‘I’ve seen water problems in poor countries and the third world’, said Maude Barlow, the board chairwoman of the nonprofit Food and Water Watch. ‘But I’ve never seen this in the United States, never.'”

To watch the CBC news report, click here.

The New York Times article can be found here.

Further reading
Violations of the right to water in Detroit highlighted, UN responds.

Council of Canadians to organize water convoy to Detroit.