Maude Barlow Interview

This is an enlightening interview in The Progressive with Maude Barlow, the first senior adviser on water issues for the United Nations and the author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

Q: How dire is the water crisis?

Maude Barlow: Americans need to know that there are thirty-six states in the United States that are going to experience serious to severe water problems in the next five to ten years. Right now, there are at least seven states that are just absolutely at the water wall. The Colorado River is in catastrophic decline. This is not cyclical drought. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the big backup reservoirs, are themselves in crisis.

I feel a kind of desperation, almost, to tell this story so that people start to understand and grapple with it. This is the most important human rights and ecological crisis of our time.

Q: You say politicians “are in some kind of inexplicable denial.” Why is that?

Barlow: We live in a world where our leaders have adopted one vision of development: neoliberal economic globalization, market-based growth. You’ve got to keep growing, you’ve got to compete by killing the other guy’s farms, and so on. It’s all based on this competitive model, and not on a much more cooperative local model of sustainable food or sustainable living.

The water crisis comes along, and rather than face this, these governments and their corporate friends and their political leaders are all saying, “Well, it’s just a temporary issue. We’ll deal with it. It’s kind of like energy. We’ll find new sources. Don’t you worry.”

The water crisis interrupts their theory that unlimited growth is sustainable. It’s not. If they really understood the water crisis and dealt with it, they would have to admit that we can’t keep going on the way we’re going on.