Thirsting for answers

What happens when water, a vital element of life on earth, is privatized and therefore turned into a source of competition and monetary gain?

This question is answered in Irene Salina’s award-winning documentary, Flow: For the Love of Water (2008), which will be screened by the Women’s Resource Center Monday, Nov. 28, to celebrate Social Sustainability Month.

A gripping and unsettling account of the growing urgency of water politics, the film interviews activists and scientists in several fields to send a message of warning and of hope.

“This is not the first time the WRC has shown a film depicting current issues surrounding the ideas of access to drinkable water as a human right, water rights, the problems with bottled water and water pollution,” said Kate Shepard, member of the social sustainability month planning committee.

Flow opens with the calming sound of a flowing stream. Then voices speak of the growing water crisis: rocket fuel and dangerous chemicals in tap water; the possibility of draught as the cause of the next mass extinction on earth and the cold statistic that over two million children under the age of two die from water-related causes every year.

Because of its simple construction, Flow is all the more jarring. There is a disturbing and desperate element in how the film spells out the gravity of the global consequences of continuing to waste and pollute water as we do now.

“Many people do not have access to drinkable water and many people die from drinking polluted water every year,” Shepard said. “The privatization of water is especially alarming as people are being overcharged for drinking water and must turn to polluted water instead.”

Flow delves into pollution, war, institutional classism and racism, and, of course, corporate profits. Political activists, biologists and anthropologists testify to what happens to the global community when water becomes a for-profit commodity.

Three multinational water conglomerates have approached poverty-stricken countries and communities, promising them clean water. Slowly constricting the communities’ water access and alternative options, the communities must eventually choose to purchase their precious resource for exorbitant prices from the corporation in question or face disease and death from infected rivers or streams.

Countries facing this crisis such as India, South Africa and Lesotho have been politically and economically strangled by the cutthroat practices. In one scene, corporations are shown displacing thousands of rural citizens to build dams that pollute the atmosphere, disrupt ecosystems and otherwise ruin lives.

The film gives us many gut-wrenching personal accounts, putting a face on the consequences of water privatization. Flow repeatedly reminds us that the problem of water scarcity is not thousands of miles away. It’s in our backyard. It’s in our drinking glass.

“We have been experiencing a lot of controversy over water rights as Nestle attempts to move into Cascade Locks,” Shepard said.

She explained that the WRC is screening the film in partnership with Take Back the Tap, which will facilitate discussion after the film.

Flow argues that the only way to overcome the looming mass water shortages and the injustices that accompany it is to work collectively

“This is the century of community, the century of common people,” says a biologist in the film.

“The WRC is dedicated to the Social Sustainability movement’s work to create a world that works for all,” Shepard said. “Water is a global issue and is becoming increasingly alarming.”