The ‘Adobe House’, El Manzano’s ecological demonstration house.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

In the middle of the little El Manzano village, on display to all in the community, is the ‘Adobe House’. This demonstration house is a project by Eco Escuela El Manzano to demonstrate to the community several low-tech but effective techniques for improving quality of life whilst reducing a home’s impact on the environment.

Houses made from adobe bricks are common in Chile, although, increasingly, like many ‘developing’ countries, people are turning towards energy disastrous concrete instead. The Adobe House was not purpose built – rather, it is actually a very old house that was retrofitted in 2008. It is thus a good example of what many villagers could do if they had a mind to.

I’ll share a few of its features.

Against one wall they built a simple conservatory. The earth brick wall absorbs heat during the day, warming the home, and radiates it back out during the night – to ensure an extended frost-free period for vegetables. Well positioned terracotta tiles or other high thermal mass elements can increase this energy buffering as well (even just barrels of water can do the trick). Though not incorporated here, another addition can be to add vents between the conservatory and the home to allow excess heat to pass into the house.

During the hotter parts of the year the ends of the conservatory are easily opened up.

Outside the house and conservatory there’s a trellis hung heavy in grape. It creates an excellent, and edible, shade area under which sits an outdoor table and benches for summer breakfasts and lunches. The foliage dies back during the winter months to let more sunshine through.

Next to this sits a fantastic earth oven. And yes, the bread was as good as it looks:

Other elements include the all-important manual pump for water – without which this community would have suffered dearly during the recent earthquake (see Part I) – and a greywater system for biologically cleaning household waste water, returning it, slowly, to the water table after several stages of natural cleaning.

Potty Training

The ‘centrepiece’ of this demonstration site, however, is this:

A composting toilet (or ‘dry toilet’ as they’re called here)

This elevated, dual-chamber throne room (similar to the one at Zaytuna Farm) serves as the home’s fertiliser collection station. When enconsed therein, or thereon, as the case may be, the room is notable for its lack of odor. Any odor.

Although composting humanure should be regarded as an urgent… um… call of nature everywhere (the world is running out of potable water, and yet we’re crapping in it, and we still haven’t come to terms with the significance of phosphorus recycling yet either), it is arguably even more important here in El Manzano.

I say this for two connected reasons: 1) most of the community here rely on ‘long drop’ toilets (simple holes dug into the ground), and 2) the water table in El Manzano is incredibly close to the surface – in many places barely a metre below ground.

In case the obvious eludes you – this means that these smelly, bacteria-filled repositories will be seeping into the water table…. Yes, this is the same water table they’re pumping water from so as to quench their thirsty lips. If it weren’t for the very low population density here I think we could be looking at some serious health issues.

The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are therefore turning the problem into the solution, by demonstrating how a potentially disastrous waste stream can instead become a resource. The Abobe House has a constant stream of students and interns residing in it – all of whom are building site fertility rather than contributing to water contamination.

Continue on to read Part V: The Design Stage

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Further Reading:

• Compost Toilet – Farallones (237kb PDF)
• Compost Toilet – Minimus (459kb PDF)
• Urine-Diverting Toilet, Vietnam (3.4mb PDF)
• Low-Cost Compost Toilets (3.45mb PDF)
• The Humanure Handbook

If we are being honest with ourselves, most people would admit that the next 50 years is going to be a lot different than the past 50 years. Future generations are going to need to cope with overwhelming conditions that they had nothing to do with creating.

I believe that we need regular reminders and need fresh perspectives to assess what is going to happen tomorrow and how our actions today have an affect.

We are entering into critical times as we reach tipping points on economy, climate, energy, food, water, soil, and social elements. This video is a great call to action; Permaculture Design is the action!

Gold is beautiful, of that there is no doubt. Fantastically, it has somehow come to simultaneously symbolise both matrimonial bliss, fidelity and purity as well as greed, excess and despotism. These things we all know. But, there’s another side to gold of which you may not be aware. Gold is now, with an accentuated consumer awareness, also beginning to symbolise polluted land and water (with a permanence comparable to nuclear contamination), the abuse of workers and the harassment and eviction of indigenous peoples.

A gold mine in Peru piles up ore and drips cyanide through the heap

About 80% of the gold mined today is refined and made into jewellery. The ‘unnecessary’ nature of this usage makes the following information all the more obscene:

• Gold mining is one of the dirtiest businesses in the world. The production of one gold ring generates 20 ton of mine waste
• Open-pit gold mines essentially obliterate the landscape, opening up vast craters, flattening or even inverting mountaintops, and producing 8 to 10 times more waste than underground mining
• Cyanide is used by large mining operations to separate gold from ore. Cyanide pollution is a major concern. A rice-grain sized dose of cyanide can be fatal to humans; concentrations of 1 microgram (one-millionth of a gram) per liter of water can be fatal to fish
• Metals mining employs just 0.09 percent of the global workforce but consumes as much as 10 percent of world energy
• Between 1995 and 2015, approximately half the gold produced worldwide has or will come from indigenous peoples’ lands
• Metals mining is the number one toxic polluter in the United States, responsible for 89% of arsenic releases, 85% of mercury releases, and 84% of lead releases in 2004
• The world’s largest open pit, the Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, is visible to astronauts from outer space. It measures 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) deep and 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) across
• 120,000 tons of toxic waste spilled from the Baia Mare gold mine in Romania in 2000, contaminating the drinking water of 2.5 million people and killing 1,200 tons of fish
• Experts predict that the abandoned Iron Mountain mine in California will continue to poison its watershed with acid mine drainage for over 3000 years

There’s nothing romantic about a toxic gold mine

These figures come from the No Dirty Gold website – a high profile campaign against destructive gold mining techniques and methods. The campaign has met with some success, as several leading jewellery suppliers have pledged themselves to support the Golden Rules of responsible mining. Check out the site. Aside from the astonishing environmental consequences, the impact on local communities around the world merits our attention and action on this topic.

Let’s put some values in our valuables.

Not long ago I was standing in a bookshop, minding my own business, when a book title leapt out in front of me. The book was "History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them". It documents the sorry tales of dozens of people throughout history who, with the best of intentions, made some fascinatingly terrible choices.

I scanned the book’s contents page, purposefully, looking for a specific name – that of the recently deceased, Iowa born agronomist, Norman Borlaug. I failed to find him amongst all the unfortunates chosen for inclusion, but then I really didn’t expect to. My lack of surprise was not because I didn’t think he was deserving – I would likely have put him at top of the list myself – but because, in general, the human race is largely ignorant of the grave implications of his work. This ignorance is made glaringly obvious when you consider he is widely celebrated as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. He even received a Nobel Peace Prize, amongst several other awards, for his disaster of a contribution to mankind.

Mr. Borlaug is father of the very inappropriately named ‘Green Revolution’ – the post World War II industrialisation of agriculture. He is credited with saving millions of people from starvation after World War II. And, credit where credit is due – he probably did. He hybridised seed strains to develop high yield varieties, which in and of itself might not have been such a bad thing. But Borlaug’s work didn’t stop there. The outcome was the creation of a colour-by-numbers, fossil fuel-, chemical- and irrigation-dependent approach to agriculture that saw large scale monocrops become the system of choice worldwide and gave birth to the ‘get big or get out’ agricultural policies of the 1970s. The resulting reductionist bid to deal with, and capitalise on, all the symptoms of this unnatural shift then gave birth that ultimate method of social control and profiteering – genetic engineering.

The industrialisation of our food supply means that our current production is extremely oil intensive. It has been calculated that, on average, it takes ten calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food in our current setup. Some food has an even more ridiculous ratio – like corn-fed feedlot beef which consumes about 55 fossil fuel calories to one calorie of meat. We are effectively eating oil.

This is of course an insane state of affairs. As oil production wanes this puts us in an extremely vulnerable position. If our current system remains unchanged, we face acute food shortages in the near future, and that’s without even taking into account the major crop failures we’re getting now as a result of climate change. It is precisely why in 2008, when oil prices tripled in a matter of months, people began to riot worldwide as they got priced out of the ability to eat. The recession has somewhat alleviated this problem, but it won’t be long before crisis strikes again and becomes a permanent condition for humanity.

Big Agribusiness not only uses a disproportional amount of oil, they also empty our soils of life and organic matter (primarily carbon) – destroying the natural soil fertility that would make their fertiliser-in-a-bottle products obsolete and thus also making agriculture the largest contributor to climate change. Same goes for water. Agriculture, as implemented today, is by far the largest consumer and contaminator of water of all industries. Its runoff is also responsible for large and growing ocean dead zones in coastal areas around the world. It is also the biggest driver of deforestation and the main culprit for the mass extinctions and biodiversity loss currently underway.

Not only did the Green Revolution make our entire food system wholly dependent on finite resources, and make it function in such a way that it undermines them all, it also shifted demographics (his work has fueled a population boom whilst transitioning much of the world’s population off the land, where they could have been small scale stewards of it, into city dwellings) to such an extent that we may well see widespread starvation as peak oil issues become more pronounced, and widespread revolution and bloodshed if we can’t find a way to peacefully re-ruralise the world so we can get back to a sustainable footing.

In short: we’ve been subsidising our food supply over the last sixty years by stealing energy, soil, water and health from the future. But, now, the future is here. In saving millions, Borlaug could well have consigned many more millions, or even billions, of us to death. He has left us with quite a legacy – the enormous challenge of having to find a way to rapidly but peacefully reverse his life’s work.

If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year [2010], throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food [in 2010]…. – 2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

The food crisis he’s talking about is not constrained to just the two-thirds world countries…

Thanks Norman. We know you meant well…. Pity you couldn’t have hung around long enough to see it all play out.

Beginning a Detour Around Catastrophe?

In light of these realities, I like to find hope where I can. Realising the implications of the thoughts above, some local initiatives are looking at ways to reduce this outright vulnerability. And now, finally, at least on the surface, it looks like the UK government may be beginning to take this issue a little more seriously as well.

Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.

The government’s 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.

… The Tories said ministers "belatedly" recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.

Environment Secretary Mr Benn unveiled the government’s Food 2030 plan at the Oxford Farming Conference and said a rising population and climate change meant food could not be taken for granted.

… The government also wants less food waste, more food bought in season to reduce environmental impact and to encourage people to buy sustainably-farmed food. – BBC

There are some excellent signals in the Food 2030 report – like a push for more land for communities to grow their own food on, and training thousands more teachers and students in how to grow their own (the ‘Growing Schools‘ program). I really wish I could end this article right here – on this positive note. Unfortunately I can’t. Industry lobbyists are clearly working behind the scenes to ensure this crisis will not only maintain their current level of profits, but also increase them.

The food strategy, set to be launched on Tuesday by Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, will encourage consumers to throw less food away and to adopt leaner and healthier diets. It will promote higher crop yields, urge food producers to reduce the impact they have on the environment, and recommend a move towards accepting GM crops in order to create a "sustainable and secure food system for 2030". – Telegraph

GM crops for more security? How, exactly, does that work in light of this, this, this, this and this? And how can the words ‘GM crops’ and ‘healthier diets’ coexist in the same paragraph? (See this, this and this for example.)

Furthermore:

… the report will pledge that the UK will keep lobbying to create a more liberalised global food market. – Telegraph

A "more liberalised global food market" will bring profits to a few commodity brokers, but will also continue dismantling the food economy in ‘developing’ countries – whilst we have the deluded belief we’re helping ‘the poor’ to raise their standard of living to something resembling ours (a dangerous ambition). It will continue to pit low wage workers in these countries against local farmers in the North, undercutting and disincentivising them. In both the South and the North, we need more farmers – millions more – not less.

The campaign group Sustain said the report avoided tough issues…. "The government’s food vision is hardly worthy of the name. The document proposes a series of minor tweaks to our fundamentally unsustainable food system."- Guardian

Borlaug’s ’strategy’ was to keep perservering down the Road of Vulnerability, perpetually and furiously trying to stay one step ahead of all the problems the industrial system creates – fossil fuel consumption, soil and water loss and contamination, plant disease and pest attack, etc. This culminates in the need to forever tweak plant characteristics through chemicals and genetic engineering.

Defenders of the green revolution, such as Borlaug, place their hopes on the promise of a never-ending cycle of innovation. We’ll keep redesigning plants into organisms that yield ever greater bounty, while consuming fewer nutrients, staying one step ahead of the grim reaper, for as long as necessary. Science will save us.

But what if scientists poured as much energy into studying how to improve organic farming methods as they did into recombinant DNA? The authors of "Organic agriculture and the global food supply" believe that current organic farming yields could be greatly increased, if we knew more about how to build ecologically balanced agricultural systems. But such research hasn’t been the priority of either academia or government. It’s time for that to change. It’s time to show organic farmers the money. – Salon.com

Biodiverse systems are proven to be more productive. A progressive, staged reversion to small scale polycultures will restore soil, water, personal and even climate health – making risky genetic engineering redundant. Such a reversion is a win-win-win situation.

What will stop such a reversion happening is the perceived need to persevere with a profit and competition-based economy and a lack of education in genuinly holistic agricultural, biological science. Industry will fight us every step of the way. The perversion of the market system is that, up until a tipping point that leads to complete social collapse at least, the greater the suffering the more profit there is to make. These companies are incentivised to ensure their products are continually required. (The corporate dissatisfaction with Michelle Obama’s organic garden is a case in point.) Hence my continual cry that we need to change society at a wholly foundational level. The ‘free’ market economy, even if it were truly free, would not enable us to buy our way out of this mess.

The longer we avoid the need to decentralise and relocalise our food systems, the greater the crisis. While we study options for systemic change, duplicating landshare initiatives like this is a great way to get started at a grass roots level, and Michael Pollan’s one and a half hour presentation below begins to tackle the political policy changes we need to push for to get things moving in the right direction.

The good news is there is a growing food revolution. We just need to ensure our politicians allow it to flourish and don’t give in to the greenwashing demands of Big Agribusiness. The ‘Food 2030′ announcement risks leading the world’s citizenry to assume something tangible is actually being done to address this painfully sharp edge of the biggest convergence of crises in human history, when it really is just a little medicine mixed with a large dose of placebo.

One way or another, we’re beginning to see the end of the industrial agriculture era. Our task is ensuring it gets replaced as rapidly and painlessly as possible with relocalised, resilient systems.

What do you think? Are we facing crisis? If so, what should we be doing about it?

Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture
Duration: 1:26:14
Click on ‘Watch Full Program’ link at bottom right of video screen

India is a country where water shortages have become so acute that the failed monsoon rains in 2009 had people literally killing each other over buckets of water, and tensions are still rising. (See this video also.) In many places cities are receiving less than half the water their populations need to meet basic requirements, and the constant bickering between individual states often breaks down into violent clashes.

Glaciers that provide melt water in the north are disappearing. and fast. Indians are simultaneously switching to a more westernised diet, which has enormous impacts on water usage, and large scale monocrops for biofuels add to the disaster. Presently 90% of India’s water usage is for agriculture. This percentage is rising, whilst competition is increasing with the growing industrial sector. India’s population is expected to surge to 1.5 billion people by 2050, and the country is still rapidly urbanising – with city dwellers using a lot more water than their rural counterparts. It is predicted that by 2020 most major Indian cities will run dry.

And India is not alone with these problems.

Businesses, of course, are making the most of the situation to cash in on the intense demand. I think it’s time to pay attention to water harvesting words of wisdom, and solve these problems at source – and in doing so also heal the land:

With wisdom and wit, Anupam Mishra talks about the amazing feats of engineering built centuries ago by the people of India’s Golden Desert to harvest water. These structures are still used today — and are often superior to modern water megaprojects. – YouTube

Hat Tip: Robert Windt

And, for good measure:

Further Reading:

• Letters from Sri Lanka – The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Muffin Tin and the Sponge
• Harvesting Urban Drool
• Water Harvesting DVD
• Water Worries

History is littered with sordid tales of tribes and nations taking the best land and resources from others by force. These were in times where the population density was so low that greed, rather than need, was often the primary motivator. Two thousand years ago, for example, the world population was 3% of what it is today.

Today’s politically correct and population dense world doesn’t look so kindly on such pillaging (although, of course, it still goes on). The modern way is far more, let’s say… discrete. Rather than a sword or a tank, the weapon of choice is now more often a checkbook. The motivation, however, seems to still be the same.

Although the average person may not realise it, water shortage concerns are reaching the highest levels – resulting in a race between some of the world’s most powerful groups to privatise and take control of this most essential of resources.

The two clips below share a frightening insight into the exploitation, profiteering and control of water.

The key issue at stake is whether we determine water to be a ‘need’, or a ‘right’. The former understanding labels water as a ‘good’ (product, commodity) that can be privatised and ‘managed’ for profit, the latter a basic right that should be denied no one, and kept in the public domain for the greater good of all. The speaker is Maude Barlow, author of the Who Owns Water? post we just ran (highly recommended reading). Maude Barlow is the Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and a board member of Washington-based Food and Water Watch.

Part I – Duration 31 minutes

Part II – Duration 35 minutes

by Maude Barlow (founder of the Blue Planet Project) & Tony Clarke, originally published September, 2002

Water – a need, or a right?

Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.

As the World Summit on Sustainable Development draws closer, clear lines of contention are forming, particularly around the future of the world’s freshwater resources. The setting of the summit paints the picture. Government and corporate delegates to the September meeting will gather in the lavish hotels and convention facilities of Sandton, the fabulously wealthy Johannesburg suburb that houses huge estates, English gardens and swimming pools, and has become South Africa’s new financial epicenter. There, they will meet with World Bank and World Trade Organization officials to set the stage for the privatization of water.

At the same time, activists from South Africa and around the world with a very different vision will gather in very different settings to fight for a water-secure future. One such venue will be Alexandra Township, a poverty-stricken community where sanitation, electricity and water services have been privatized and cut off to those who cannot afford them. Alexandra is situated right next door to Sandton and divided only by a river so polluted that it has cholera warning signs on its banks. There could not be a more fitting setting for Rio+10 than South Africa, because neighboring Sandton and Alexandra represent the great divide that characterizes the current debate over water. Moreover, South Africa is the birthplace of one of the nucleus groups that form the heart of a new global civil society movement dedicated to saving the world’s water as part of the global commons.

This movement originates in a fight for survival. The world is running out of fresh water. Humanity is polluting, diverting and depleting the wellspring of life at a startling rate. With every passing day, our demand for fresh water outpaces its availability, and thousands more people are put at risk. Already, the social, political and economic impacts of water scarcity are rapidly becoming a destabilizing force, with water-related conflicts springing up around the globe. Quite simply, unless we dramatically change our ways, between one-half and two-thirds of humanity will be living with severe freshwater shortages within the next quarter-century.

It seemed to sneak up on us, or at least those of us living in the North. Until the past decade, the study of fresh water was left to highly specialized groups of experts — hydrologists, engineers, scientists, city planners, weather forecasters and others with a niche interest in what so many of us took for granted. Many knew about the condition of water in the Third World, including the millions who die of waterborne diseases every year. But this was seen as an issue of poverty, poor sanitation and injustice — all areas that could be addressed in the just world for which we were fighting.Now, however, an increasing number of voices — including human rights and environmental groups, think tanks and research organizations, official international agencies and thousands of community groups around the world — are sounding the alarm. The earth’s fresh water is finite and small, representing less than one half of 1 percent of the world’s total water stock. Not only are we adding 85 million new people to the planet every year, but our per capita use of water is doubling every twenty years, at more than twice the rate of human population growth. A legacy of factory farming, flood irrigation, the construction of massive dams, toxic dumping, wetlands and forest destruction, and urban and industrial pollution has damaged the Earth’s surface water so badly that we are now mining the underground water reserves far faster than nature can replenish them.

The earth’s “hot stains” — areas where water reserves are disappearing — include the Middle East, Northern China, Mexico, California and almost two dozen countries in Africa. Today thirty-one countries and over 1 billion people completely lack access to clean water. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water. The global freshwater crisis looms as one of the greatest threats ever to the survival of our planet.

Tragically, this global call for action comes in an era guided by the principles of the so-called Washington Consensus, a model of economics rooted in the belief that liberal market economics constitutes the one and only economic choice for the whole world. Competitive nation-states are abandoning natural resources protection and privatizing their ecological commons. Everything is now for sale, even those areas of life, such as social services and natural resources, that were once considered the common heritage of humanity. Governments around the world are abdicating their responsibilities to protect the natural resources in their territory, giving authority away to the private companies involved in resource exploitation.

Faced with the suddenly well-documented freshwater crisis, governments and international institutions are advocating a Washington Consensus solution: the privatization and commodification of water. Price water, they say in chorus; put it up for sale and let the market determine its future. For them, the debate is closed. Water, say the World Bank and the United Nations, is a “human need,” not a “human right.” These are not semantics; the difference in interpretation is crucial. A human need can be supplied many ways, especially for those with money. No one can sell a human right.

So a handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are aggressively taking over the management of public water services in countries around the world, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third World’s desperate search for solutions to its water crisis. Some are startlingly open; the decline in freshwater supplies and standards has created a wonderful venture opportunity for water corporations and their investors, they boast. The agenda is clear: Water should be treated like any other tradable good, with its use determined by the principles of profit.It should come as no surprise that the private sector knew before most of the world about the looming water crisis and has set out to take advantage of what it considers to be blue gold. According to Fortune, the annual profits of the water industry now amount to about 40 percent of those of the oil sector and are already substantially higher than the pharmaceutical sector, now close to $1 trillion. But only about 5 percent of the world’s water is currently in private hands, so it is clear that we are talking about huge profit potential as the water crisis worsens. In 1999 there were more than $15 billion worth of water acquisitions in the US water industry alone, and all the big water companies are now listed on the stock exchanges.

Water Lords

There are ten major corporate players now delivering freshwater services for profit. The two biggest are both from France — Vivendi Universal and Suez — considered to be the General Motors and Ford of the global water industry. Between them, they deliver private water and wastewater services to more than 200 million customers in 150 countries and are in a race, along with others such as Bouygues Saur, RWE-Thames Water and Bechtel-United Utilities, to expand to every corner of the globe. In the United States, Vivendi operates through its subsidiary, USFilter; Suez via its subsidiary, United Water; and RWE by way of American Water Works.

They are aided by the World Bank and the IMF, which are increasingly forcing Third World countries to abandon their public water delivery systems and contract with the water giants in order to be eligible for debt relief. The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well documented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cutoffs to customers who cannot pay, no transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery and corruption.

Water for profit takes a number of other forms. The bottled-water industry is one of the fastest-growing and least regulated industries in the world, expanding at an annual rate of 20 percent. Last year close to 90 billion liters of bottled water were sold around the world — most of it in nonreusable plastic containers, bringing in profits of $22 billion to this highly polluting industry. Bottled-water companies like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are engaged in a constant search for new water supplies to feed the insatiable appetite of this business. In rural communities all over the world, corporate interests are buying up farmlands, indigenous lands, wilderness tracts and whole water systems, then moving on when sources are depleted. Fierce disputes are being waged in many places over these “water takings,” especially in the Third World. As one company explains, water is now “a rationed necessity that may be taken by force.”

Corporations are now involved in the construction of massive pipelines to carry fresh water long distances for commercial sale while others are constructing supertankers and giant sealed water bags to transport vast amounts of water across the ocean to paying customers. Says the World Bank, “One way or another, water will soon be moved around the world as oil is now.” The mass movement of bulk water could have catalytic environmental impacts. Some proposed projects would reverse the flow of mighty rivers in Canada’s north, the environmental impact of which would be greater than China’s Three Gorges Dam.

At the same time, governments are signing away their control over domestic water supplies to trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, its expected successor, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the World Trade Organization. These global trade institutions effectively give transnational corporations unprecedented access to the freshwater resources of signatory countries. Already, corporations have started to sue governments in order to gain access to domestic water sources and, armed with the protection of these international trade agreements, are setting their sights on the commercialization of water.

Water is listed as a “good” in the WTO and NAFTA, and as an “investment” in NAFTA. It is to be included as a “service” in the upcoming WTO services negotiations (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) and in the FTAA. Under the “National Treatment” provisions of NAFTA and the GATS, signatory governments who privatize municipal water services will be obliged to permit competitive bids from transnational water-service corporations. Similarly, once a permit is granted to a domestic company to export water for commercial purposes, foreign corporations will have the right to set up operations in the host country.

NAFTA contains a provision that requires “proportional sharing” of energy resources now being traded between the signatory countries. This means that the oil and gas resources no longer belong to the country of extraction, but are a shared resource of the continent. For example, under NAFTA, Canada now exports 57 percent of its natural gas to the United States and is not allowed to cut back on these supplies, even to cut fossil fuel production under the Kyoto accord. Under this same provision, if Canada started selling its water to the United States — which President Bush has already said he considers to be part of the United States’ continental energy program — the State Department would consider it to be a trade violation if Canada tried to turn off the tap. And under NAFTA’s “investor state” Chapter 11 provision, American corporate investors would be allowed to sue Canada for financial losses [see William Greider, "The Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century," October 15, 2001]. Already, a California company is suing the Canadian government for $10.5 billion because the province of British Columbia banned the commercial export of bulk water.The WTO also opens the door to the commercial export of water by prohibiting the use of export controls for any “good” for any purpose. This means that quotas or bans on the export of water imposed for environmental reasons could be challenged as a form of protectionism. At the December 2001 Qatar ministerial meeting of the WTO, a provision was added to the so-called Doha Text, which requires governments to give up “tariff” and “nontariff” barriers — such as environmental regulations — to environmental services, which include water.

The Case Against Privatization

If all this sounds formidable, it is. But the situation is not without hope. For the fact is, we know how to save the world’s water: reclamation of despoiled water systems, drip irrigation over flood irrigation, infrastructure repairs, water conservation, radical changes in production methods and watershed management, just to name a few. Wealthy industrialized countries could supply every person on earth with clean water if they canceled the Third World debt, increased foreign aid payments and placed a tax on financial speculation.

None of this will happen, however, until humanity earmarks water as a global commons and brings the rule of law — local, national and international — to any corporation or government that dares to contaminate it. If we allow the commodification of the world’s freshwater supplies, we will lose the capacity to avert the looming water crisis. We will be allowing the emergence of a water elite that will determine the world’s water future in its own interest. In such a scenario, water will go to those who can afford it and not to those who need it.

This is not an argument to excuse the poor way in which some governments have treated their water heritage, either squandering it, polluting it or using it for political gain. But the answer to poor nation-state governance is not a nonaccountable transnational corporation but good governance. For governments in poor countries, the rich world’s support should go not to profiting from bad water management but from aiding the public sector in every country to do its job.

The commodification of water is wrong — ethically, environmentally and socially. It insures that decisions regarding the allocation of water would center on commercial, not environmental or social justice considerations. Privatization means that the management of water resources is based on principles of scarcity and profit maximization rather than long-term sustainability. Corporations are dependent on increased consumption to generate profits and are much more likely to invest in the use of chemical technology, desalination, marketing and water trading than in conservation.

Depending on desalination technology is a Faustian bargain. It is prohibitively expensive, highly energy intensive — using the very fossil fuels that are contributing to global warming — and produces a lethal byproduct of saline brine that is a major cause of marine pollution when dumped back into the oceans at high temperatures.

The antidote to water commodification is its decommodification. Water must be declared and understood for all time to be the common property of all. In a world where everything is being privatized, citizens must establish clear perimeters around those areas that are sacred to life and necessary for the survival of the planet. Simply, governments must declare that water belongs to the earth and all species and is a fundamental human right. No one has the right to appropriate it for profit. Water must be declared a public trust, and all governments must enact legislation to protect the freshwater resources in their territory. An international legal framework is also desperately needed.

It is strikingly clear that neither governments nor their official global institutions are going to rise to this challenge. This is where civil society comes in. There is no more vital area of concern for our international movement than the world’s freshwater crisis. Our entry point is the political question of the ownership of water; we must come together to form a clear and present opposition to the commodification and cartelization of the world’s freshwater resources.

Already, a common front of environmentalists, human rights and antipoverty activists, public sector workers, peasants, indigenous peoples and many others from every part of the world has come together to fight for a water-secure future based on the notion that water is part of the public commons. We coordinated strategy at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, last January. We will be in South Africa for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September and in Kyoto, Japan, next March, when the World Bank and the UN bring 8,000 people to the Third World Water Forum. There, we will oppose water privatization and promote our own World Water Vision as an alternative to that adopted by the World Bank at the Second World Water Forum in The Hague two years ago. We will stand with local people fighting water privatization in Bolivia, or the construction of a mega-dam in India, or water takings by Perrier in Michigan, but now all of these local struggles will form part of an emerging international movement with a common political vision.Steps needed for a water-secure future include the adoption of a Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons; a guaranteed “water lifeline” — free clean water every day for every person as an inalienable political and social right; national water protection acts to reclaim and preserve freshwater systems; exemptions for water from international trade and investment regimes; an end to World Bank and IMF-enforced water privatizations; and a Global Water Convention that would create an international body of law to protect the world’s water heritage based on the twin cornerstones of conservation and equity. A tough challenge indeed. But given the stakes involved, we had better be up to it.

Switzerland is often portrayed as a clean, green, intelligent, peace-loving nation. Dramatic landscapes apparently have beautiful, golden, braided-haired women prancing about innocently picking flowers from hillsides dripping in milk, honey and chocolate.

But, the beauty of globalisation and the international food swap model is that the darker side of modern industry can be hidden away on the other side of the world. Embarrassing, incriminating activities can be kept separate from oompa loompaville, away from prying eyes and swept into the remotest places – where there are virgin soils still to be found and gorged upon, where environmental regulations are weak or nonexistent and where legal protection for indigenous people are disincentivised in the quest for profit and ‘development’.

The Swiss company Syngenta – one of the world’s largest transnational agribusiness corporations, one well-known for its production of agrochemicals and GM seeds – however, has still managed to attract attention to itself even in far away Brazil. Like with other agribusiness companies we could mention, competitiveness is key to success, and externalising costs – at any cost – is one of the best ways to achieve this.

I won’t give you a long treatise on the document embedded here, but leave you to peruse yourself. In it you will find details about illegal GMO and chemical polluting and the persecution and murder of the local people who were inconveniently protesting against the same. Syngenta stands accused of violating Brazil’s Federal Constitution, their environmental laws, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other national and international laws.

Further Reading:

• Food Miles, or Fair Miles?

by Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

China walks a tightrope between feast and famine.

As the U.N. climate-change conference in Copenhagen approaches, we are in a race between political tipping points and natural ones. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep the melting of the Greenland ice sheet from becoming irreversible? Can we close coal-fired power plants in time to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau? Can we head off ever more intense crop-withering heat waves before they create chaos in world grain markets?

These are all climate-change issues, but they have something else in common: food. Copenhagen will be about climate, of course, but in a fundamental sense, it must also be about whether we will have enough to eat in the decades to come.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. As the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets continue to shrink, sea levels will rise, threatening rice harvests around the globe. Recent projections show that the sea could rise up to six feet this century (if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would rise by 23 feet). According to the World Bank, it would take only a three-foot rise in sea level to cover half the rice fields in Bangladesh, a country of nearly 160 million people. Such an increase would also inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half the rice crop in Vietnam, the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. And it would submerge parts of the 20 or so other rice-growing river deltas in Asia.

Melting mountain glaciers are even more worrisome. The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland recently reported the 18th consecutive year of shrinking mountain glaciers around the world, from the Andes to the Rockies, from the Alps to the mountain ranges of Asia. Of these, the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau threatens to shrink food supplies most sharply. Their annual ice melt sustains the major rivers of India and China – the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers – during the dry season. And this water in turn supplies irrigation systems.

Yao Tandong, one of China’s leading glaciologists, warned last year in the journal Nature that two-thirds of the country’s glaciers could be gone by 2050, and has said that "the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe."

It will also lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. China is the world’s leading producer of wheat. India is No. 2. These two countries also dominate the world’s rice harvest. But unlike in the United States (the third-largest wheat producer), where wheat is watered largely by rainfall, most crops in China and India are irrigated. The vanishing of mountain glaciers in Asia therefore represents the biggest threat to the world food supply that we have ever seen. .

For complete article, please click here.

Piles of rubbish, and an incredible stench, border a main market street in
Leh, Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir, northern India. Photo © Craig Mackintosh

The stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms – social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. Throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth’s geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York’s garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia – with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long – impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York’s garbage – if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia’s Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City’s trash. “I understand the problem New York faces,” he noted, “but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping ground.”

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada’s largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens’s garbage, the city’s daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

One of the more recent garbage crises is unfolding in China, where, like everything else in the country, the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. Xinhua, a Chinese wire service, reports that a survey using an airborne remote sensor detected 7,000 garbage dumps, each larger than 50 square meters in the suburbs of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. A large share of China’s garbage is recycled, burned, or composted, but an even larger share is dumped in landfills (where they are available) or simply heaped up in unoccupied areas.

These examples of China’s waste problems are disturbing by themselves. But a broader analysis of potential consumption patterns in China in the near future shows why the existing western economic model as a whole will fail.

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China’s economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then before 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China’s 1.46 billion people will consume more paper than the world produces today. There go the world’s forests.

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model – the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy – is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy – one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World," and Chapter 6, “Early Signs of Decline,” in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), available for free downloading and purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm.

Further Reading:

• An Industrial Revoluton Like No Other
• Developed?