WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

Last week I received a four page letter from Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of Canadians. I paid a lot of attention to it because my 12 year old son asked me what it was about, then asked me to read it aloud. I didn't really want to because this is what it said.

They're coming to take our water...
Dear Concerned Friend (that would be me),
There is nothing more important that that miraculous liquid which makes all life possible - fresh water. But right now Canada's water - our water - is under terrible threat.

The letter went on to describe these threats - years of proposed water exports that have only just managed to be overturned. In the 1990's Nova Group of Sault Ste. Marie proposed to sell millions of litres from Lake Superior to Asia and Newfoundland proposed a plan to export 52 billion litres of water a year. In 2006, the Washington based Global Water and Energy Strategy Team (GWEST) proposed a freshwater pipeline from Manitoba to Texas; in 2007 business members and politicians from US, Canada and Mexico met in Calgary to discuss bulk water sales and this summer, the Fraser Institute released a report urging bulk water exports. You can read more at the Council of Canadians Water Campaign page.

Canada does not have a National Water Policy. Without this, companies can continue to approach the provincial governments to make deals to buy our water. Why does this matter?

Under the rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), once we begin exports, other foreign investors will be entitled to the same favourable treatment as Canadian investors. If our government tries to pass a law prohibiting these exports, corporations can sue our government for loss of business. If even one province allows water exports, trade rules say every province must allow them - with no limits on quantities.

But it matters on an even larger scale. Is water a commodity to be bought and sold or is it something larger, part of our planetary commons?

In this video, Maude Barlow explains what she thinks about water.

Should Canada refuse to export water? Should we create a National Policy that controls water exports? Can water fall into the same category as our forestry resources? Our fish, our wheat?

What do you think? Let us know in the feedback section below.

I woke up this morning to a story on the CBC website linking toxins found in the Athabasca River to the mining of the Alberta Tar Sands. Now I wish I could say that the discovery of the toxins came as a shock, but obviously it didn't, given the proximity of the Athabasca River to what Mark Morford so memorably called "the oversized eco nightmare that is Canada's monstrous, pollutive, disgusting hellholes of rapacious greed and pollution and destruction and sheer capitalistic joy".

No, the shock in this story, the one that caused my jaw to hit the floor and, by the tone of their comments, apparently caused the collective eyes of seven hundred and counting CBC readers to roll so far back into their collective skulls that all they could see was their own grey matter - the shock was this bit:

The findings counter the reports by a joint industry-government panel that the pollutant levels are due to natural sources rather than human development.

So basically, until an independently financed study debunked it, the party line agreed upon and promoted by government and industry was that the mercury, thallium and other pollutants accumulated in higher concentrations downstream from the tar sands operations as a result of natural erosion rather than human activity.

It gets better.

The body that has provided the data arguing that the water quality of the Athabasca River has not been affected by the tar sands development is called the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program (RAMP). A quick visit to RAMP's website revealed this information (in the first paragraph, no less):

RAMP is an industry-funded, multi-stakeholder environmental monitoring program initiated in 1997.

Industry-funded, eh? Well they ought to be impartial. I mean, they are making millions of dollars for their shareholders on the tar sands projects, but why would that affect their objectivity? Right?

This is on a par with the tobacco industry trotting out study after study saying "Hey, no, smoking won't kill you. Really. We promise."

What is wrong with our ability to think critically as a society, or to hold our governments and leaders to account when they so clearly fail to do so?

Commenter "sebibear" says it so well:

To the oil-sands companies and our leaders who could but do not change this... you are soulless. May you drink to your own health from the mighty and beautiful Athabasca river (preferably downstream from the oil sands).

There's a slogan on the Government of Alberta's website, in the section devoted to the tar sands. It says "Alberta. Tell it like it is." Yes Alberta, tell it like it is. No more deception or industry-funded lies. Please Alberta, come clean and tell it like it is. Take some responsibility, before it's too late.

Chip Haynes is helping to spread the news about "Stuff that Matters" on Important Media. He is a guest contributor to the green tips list featured on the blog, Planet Save. What does he suggest for green tip number five? "How's about a bicycle?", of course.

Giant Bicycles used to offer a bicycle called the Iguana. It came in green, and I always wanted one so when people asked me what I rode, I could look them in the eye and say… “I ride a Giant green Iguana.”

You don’t have to be quite that far out to go green with your bicycle- whatever you ride. Any bike you’ve got will do. You just have to do a little planning, and maybe you can leave the car at home from time to time. Wouldn’t that be nice?

You can read the entire post on Planet Save.

Chip also recently sent me his favourite bicycling video from Halcyon Bike shop's website, "a great local bike shop". I just had to pass it along. How do they get their hair to look like that?

     

Follow the epic journey of an intrepid bag as it travels hundreds of miles to join the thriving community of plastic known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This spoof is produced by Heal the Bay and narrated by actor Jeremy Irons in support of a bill to ban single-use plastic bags in California.

Richard Heinberg's Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines will be available in paperback September 3rd. As with many New Society books, the original hard cover version of Peak Everything was published at a critical time and introduced a startling new concept to our readers. With the release of Peak Everything in paperback, we are bringing this concept to an even wider audience.

Richard Heinberg writes:

In titling this book “Peak Everything,” I was suggesting that humanity has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size and consumption rates, and that the road ahead will be mostly downhill—at least for the next few decades, until our species has learned to live within Earth’s resource limits. I argued that the industrial expansion of the past century or two was mainly due to our accelerating use of the concentrated energies of cheap fossil fuels; and that as oil, coal, and natural gas cease to be cheap and abundant, economic growth will phase into contraction. I further pointed out that world oil production was at, or very nearly at its peak, and that the imminent decline in extraction rates will be decisive, because global transport is nearly all oil-dependent, and there is currently no adequate substitute for petroleum. Finally, I noted that the shift from growth to contraction will impact every aspect of human existence—financial systems, food systems, global trade—at both the macro and micro levels, threatening even our personal psychological coping mechanisms.

Nothing has happened in the past three years to change that outlook—but much has transpired to confirm it.

Read More... at the Post Carbon Institute.