The Demo Site

Toward the end of her litany of international water problems, water-justice luminary Maude Barlow paused. Her next words seemed familiar, but Barlow was clearly not comfortable saying them. “Every eight seconds a child dies due to a water-borne illness,” she sighed, adding that this was more dead kids every year than those killed by “war, malaria, AIDS, and traffic accidents combined.” Perhaps the most challenging message from her talk was that our export- and consumption-based global economic system would not provide solutions because it was actually the main cause of the problem. Careful not to blame capitalism itself, she urged her audience to keep water where it is (to conserve), to harvest rainwater, to place strict laws on pollution, and move toward a much more locally oriented economic model, one that could address the flagrant inequality of the mega-corporate system we have today. This model is a lot like the one I describe in my upcoming book, Harvest the Rain, where economic encouragement is geared toward given to small contractors who provide essential resources like water and food.