Will the World's Oceans Be Our Next Drinking Tap?

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Will the World's Oceans Be Our Next Drinking Tap?
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2008.

Desalination plants are popping up all over the world, but they may very well make the environmental crisis worse.


Stephen Hawking is no dummy. That much has been established.

Yet in 2006, when the acclaimed scientist told an audience of mostly university students and professors in China that he was "very worried about global warming" and that Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid,'' the dystopian prediction nevertheless dropped off the cultural radar after a few short weeks. Which, of course, is a sad commentary on the state of our minds, distracted as they are by horserace punditry possessed with the 2008 election, athletes on HGH, or the latest meltdown of pop tarts like Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. After all, some might argue, the thought of our verdant Earth metamorphosing into the environmental nightmare that is Venus, whose oceans evaporated millions of years ago, is beyond sci-fi, a transformation so stunning and apocalyptic that it cannot be comprehended, much less be true.

But Hawking is not alone, especially among activists and scientists who have been keeping a sharp eye on our planet's precarious water situation. And that includes Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water as well as the founder of the Blue Planet Project and the national chairperson of the advocacy group Council of Canadians.

"I fear that the global water crisis will destroy all life on earth if we do not deal with it soon," she confessed.

....

http://www.alternet.org/environment/73512/



Life requires access to clean water; to deny the right to water is to deny the right to life.
—FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO BLUE COVENANT

In their international bestseller Blue Gold, Maude Barlow and co-author Tony Clarke exposed how a handful of corporations are gaining ownership and control of the earth’s dwindling water supply, depriving millions of people around the world of access to this most basic of resources and accelerating the onset of a global water crisis.

Blue Covenant, the sequel to Blue Gold, describes a powerful response to this trend: the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to have water declared a basic human right, something that can’t be bought or sold for profit.

World-renowned activist Maude Barlow is at the center of this movement, which is gaining popular and political support across the globe, encompassing protests in India against U.S. bottling giant Coca-Cola; in Bolivia against the water privatization scheme of European water conglomerate Suez; against the use of water meters in South Africa; and over groundwater mining in Barrington, New Hampshire, and dozens of other communities in North America.

With great passion and clarity, Barlow traces the history of these international battles, documents the life-and-death stakes involved in the fight for the right to water, and lays out the actions that we as global citizens must take to secure a water-just world—a “blue covenant”—for all.

http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1674

[SteppingRazor]

1. Let's hope so. Because if you think the oil wars are bad, wait till you see the water wars. n/t

[demosincebirth]

3. Price of a bottle water at Safeway says it all.

[Hydra]

2. Water is the new oil

and it was always inevitable that we would go to desalination. We somehow manage to pollute our normal groundwater, or drain the aquifers to the point that they collapse.

Just as guilty, here- I live in the desert.