20 years!?!?!?

This past Wednesday morning I thought I woke up to a nightmare. My clock radio is tuned to KPFK 90.7FM so Amy Goodman's voice brings me out of my sleep at 6:15 am on my work days. I heard a man's voice saying, "This notion that we’ll have water forever is wrong. California is running out. It’s got twenty-some years of water. New Mexico has got ten, although they’re building golf courses as fast as they can, so maybe they can whittle that down to five." I said "WHAT!?!? 20 years of water and then that's it!" Soon another voice came on, "Scientists, through decades of study and millions and millions of pieces of data, now recognize the fact that we’re on the brink of the sixth great mass extinction ever to be experienced on the face of the earth. The fifth mass extinction was the dinosaur age."

DANG!

Extinction.

The big kiss good bye.

I remembered how 5 years ago I heard Rigoberta Menchu speak about how the oil wars were nothing compared to the upcoming water wars. She described how in Latin America companies were already privatizing water.

Back on "Democracy Now with Amy Goodman" and guests, the discussion went to how General Electric and other corporations are developing water reuse and recyling technology which is a very bad thing: "It’s the fastest-growing part of the water industry. And this is the cleanup of dirty water.
And my concern—and the more research I did on this, the more concerned I got—was that this government, in particular, the United States, but many governments, are putting all their water eggs in the basket of cleaning up dirty water, instead of conservation, instead of protecting water at its source. What they’re coming at—the way they’re coming at it now is to clean up water after it’s been polluted. And there’s huge amounts of money to be made. And my concern is, who’s going to control that? Who’s going to own the water itself? If Coca-Cola can own the water it sells you, why wouldn’t General Electric or Suez be able to say, “Well, we own the water that we cleaned up, and we will decide how much money we make, and we will decide how much—who gets it and who’s not going to get it”?"

To me the root of this is the profit motivator: Capitalism. As long as we allow natural resources to be put on the market we will always be at war with someone, somewhere.

The show ended on a good note, "Well, we’re pushing here in the United States for a trust fund for infrastructure. The sewage disposal system in the United States, as in many countries, is in a mess. We’re pushing—we have a “Think Outside the Bottle” or “Take Back the Tap” campaign for bottled water. We’re getting restaurants to agree not to serve bottled water. And we’re fighting the desalination plants, particularly in California, because it’s a bad technology, it’s an admission of failure. And we can do much more with conservation and caring for source water."

For the sake of fighting extinction, learn about this, start here: Blue Planet Project.