Review — Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis

The difficulty with our focus on global warming as the new convenient cliché is that other catastrophes get left out in the cold. Maude Barlow argues that the global water crisis is “easily as great a threat to the Earth and humans as climate change (to which it is deeply linked),” and her case is both compelling and disturbing. Among the shockers: one-tenth of the world’s irrigated crops are watered with sewage, mostly untreated, that spews out of city pipes into adjacent fields.

Barlow’s sequel to 2002’s Blue Gold covers familiar territory. We’re running out of fresh water — destroying natural cycles and draining non-renewable aquifers — while huge numbers of people can’t access clean water (130 million in Latin America alone), a situation she calls water apartheid. Canada isn’t immune either. We don’t have nearly as much renewable water as we think, and what we have we’re managing poorly. Barlow also bolsters her argument that growing corporate involvement in water matters is making things worse. World Bank–backed privatizations of water services in the global South have been a disaster resulting in pathetic service expansion, rights violations, and a decrease in overall investment in infrastructure.

Blue Covenant’s key contribution is its proposed solution: the eponymous three-part covenant of conservation, justice in North-South trade deals, and water democracy. To ensure the last, Barlow echoes calls for a UN treaty proclaiming water a human right, while asserting public needs over commercial interests. Her program flies in the face of free-market orthodoxy but is not without hope. One of her proposals is replacing private sector involvement in developing countries with a massive expansion of public enterprises.

In the world of politics, Barlow notes, expertise is flowing north, as activists in the global South are forging idiosyncratic institutions at the municipal level, incorporating community participation and oversight. They could be on to something: figuring out how to keep common resources public without handing them over to the state.