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Activist sounds alarm on water woes
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“This notion that this water crisis is only touching poor people in other countries is absolutely untrue.”
For those who live in the Great Lakes region, water is seen—quite literally—as an abundant resource. A massive body of water is but a short walk or drive. We turn on the tap and water flows from the faucet. The lake churns severe winter weather. Surely, we need not worry about this vast resource in our own backyard, right?
Wrong, says a prominent Canadian activist who brought her message to UB on Tuesday as part of “Fluid Culture,” a free, year-long lecture, arts and media series presented by the Humanities Institute.
“That basic message is that we have a world in crisis, that we have a world running out of clean water, which is something we were all taught as children was not possible,” Maude Barlow said during a press briefing Tuesday afternoon in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus. “We have polluted and mismanaged and, most importantly, extracted and displaced water around the world to an alarming extent.”
Also attending the briefing were Joseph Atkinson, professor in UB’s Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering and director of the university’s Great Lakes Program; Helen Domske, associate director of the Great Lakes Program and senior education specialist for New York Sea Grant (Cornell University); and Colleen Culleton, assistant professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, who organized the Fluid Culture series with departmental colleague Justin Read.
Barlow is the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians—Canada’s largest citizens organization—and is the author of the bestseller “Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.” She gave a lecture Tuesday evening in Clemens Hall, further pleading the case for the creation of the Great Lakes Basin Commons, a proposal to make the Great Lakes a public trust.
Barlow said the world’s water woes make it imperative for the more than 40 million U.S. and Canadian citizens who live in the Great Lakes region to fiercely protect these bodies of water from pollution and overextraction, especially in an age of increasing demand for water. In fact, Barlow said, by 2030, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent.
While the urgency of the message resonates in thousands of places across the globe, and even in parts of the country such as Texas, Arizona and California, where fresh water sources are drying up, it’s a challenging task to inform people who live near the Great Lakes to understand the severity of the situation, Barlow said.
“This notion that this water crisis is only touching poor people in other countries is absolutely untrue,” she said. “I do think that it is a case of, ‘As long as it’s OK in my backyard, it’s OK.’ And that’s the work that we have ahead of us, is to say that the world is running out of clean water.
“We live on this body of water and we don’t see all that because we still think there’s all this water,” Barlow added. “We don’t know that we’re extracting it and polluting it and that we’re also harming our body of water. For people who have the privilege to live around the Great Lakes, it’s very important for us to know what’s happening out in the world (and) to know what’s happening in the rest of North America.”
Take, for example, estimates that the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground fresh water sources, will dry up within the next quarter century. The aquifer, which stretches from South Dakota to Texas, supports food production across a vast portion of the Great Plains, but is being depleted as water is pumped out for farming and for drinking water by places that lack it.
“It’s like having a bath tub and a bunch of people around the bath tub and they have straws and they have blinders on and they’re drinking that water up as fast as they can…and there’s lots and lots and lots of water until one day there’s not a drop left and there’s no warning because it’s exponential overuse of the bath tub. That’s what’s happening,” said Barlow.
The Great Lakes Common would protect these bodies of water from a similar fate, with strict laws against hydraulic fracturing, pollution and overextraction, Barlow said.
With much of the nation’s attention focused on the economy, Barlow said it’s unconscionable that recent U.S. presidential debates and elections have lacked discussion of the looming water crisis in many states. She said she’s not in favor of stifling economic growth, but that there’s a responsible way to grow the U.S. and Canadian economies.
“What we have to collectively understand is that if we destroy our environment, there is neither an environment nor an economy. …You can’t have one without the other.”
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