Maude Barlow, the Canadian who has become one of Earth’s great defenders of clean, free water, calls her fourth book on the subject –Hope? Hmmm. It’s not easy to fit a bouncy word such as hope into the statistics she tolls off through 135 pages: the United Nations reports that call water scarcity the scourge of the Earth and link it directly to humanity’s continued degradation of lands and forests.
The book tracks her Blue Communities campaign – now in its 10th year – to persuade communities, first across Canada and now into Western Europe and the United States, to recognize fresh water and sanitation systems as human rights, to promote publicly financed, owned and operated water and waste-water services, and to ban or phase out the sale of bottled water in municipal facilities and at municipal events. This November, Los Angeles became the first major U.S.
So there is indeed hope, which is one of the two reasons Barlow’s book is worth reading, in conjunction with her frightening statistics. The other reason is because amid all the frustrations and disappointments of the global environmental crisis, Barlow seems to have hit upon a really good idea.