Q&A: "Where Has All the Water Gone?"
Interview with author and activist Maude Barlow


Maude Barlow (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40479)


HALIFAX, Canada, Dec 14 (IPS) - Imagine a planet where nuclear-powered desalination plants ring the world's oceans; corporate nanotechnology cleans up sewage water so private utilities can sell it back to consumers in plastic bottles at huge profit; and the poor who lack access to clean water die in increased numbers.

This may sound like science fiction dystopia, but according to Maude Barlow, author of the recently released book "Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water", this future is not too far away.

Barlow is the author of more than a dozen books, including "Global Showdown" and "Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future Inside Fortress North America". She sits on the board of directors of Food and Water Watch and the International Forum on Globalisation and was awarded Sweden's Right Livelihood Award (considered by many to be the "alternative Nobel Prize") in 2005 for her work on water issues.

She recently spoke with IPS contributor Chris Arsenault from her home in Ottawa.

IPS: Water, as everyone knows, moves in a cycle; it is not created or destroyed. So when water is used in a major city, a farm or any other area, doesn't it eventually enter back into the water cycle through evaporation and rain? The picture of water shortages you are painting, isn't it a little over-exaggerated?

MB: We are literally physically running out of water in many parts of the world, it's not a cyclical drought. I think that is most important thing, which I try to establish in the first chapter -- where has all the water gone?

more.. (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40479)i

What surprises me is that these authors are in Canada (The richest water country !!! )
What surprises me also is that people in the really water-poor country do not care.

About the nano-technology filtration of water, this is not illusion anymore and I have seen some models for that machine and one can install it at home when it is mass manufactured and you can even filter any type of liquid to get water out of it (Imagine that people would filter their own urine!!!). Yes there is a model for that.

This should help the poor country as the inventor of that model claims because they will have the perfect cycle. However, they forgot that when earth filtrate the water, other organisms benefit of that. While automatic filtration means that people would get their own water back at the expense of everything else and the alimentary pyramid would be destroyed.

water issues are interesting - in a sad way


but everyone questions how feasible it would be to implement such technologies in the poor parts of the world
and how safe they are as well


I believe water may be abundant in many parts of the world - lebanon included- but most of it is wasted and not utilized properly ...

Yeah but I do not think that Water is abundant in Lebanon as ex-ante