In Maude Barlow’s “Solving World Water Crises” talk, she explained how there are two main water crises that the world is currently facing: the ecological water crisis and the human water crisis. Just like all the other problems that society and the world are facing, they are interconnected. The ecological water crisis, which Barlow called the “scourge of the Earth,” is due to the increased demand of clean drinking and the decreased supply of it due to increased population and pollution. Humans are extracting ground water at a rate that the system cannot replenish itself fast enough to keep up with our demand for it. The human water crisis is that the number of people on Earth is growing, which increases the demand for clean drinking water. In 30 years, there will be 5 billion people without clean water. The solutions that Barlow has for these twin crises are that we should identify water as a human right, we should establish a public trust for the protection of water, and we need to protect our water sheds. Maude Barlow concluded her talk by quoting one of her dear friends by saying that “fighting for justice is a lot like taking a bath; do it every day or you stink.”

All the ideas Maude Barlow presented in her talk today have everything to do with our class, everything from policy to systems thinking to environmental justice. The main learning outcome that this talk relates to is how interdisciplinary everything is. All societal problems are interrelated, between each other and the earth. All of them deal with policy and culture and the environment. In order to really appreciate and make a difference in this world we really do need to understand a broader range of issues and points of views.

Personally, I feel as though it is very hard to understand something if you personally are not experiencing it or are being affected by it. Almost everywhere, the idea of coping with a problem is using the “out of sight, out of mind” expression. I think it’s an educational and eye-opening experience to go visit another country and experience first-hand the problems those countries face. So, if any of you haven’t faced a problem like this, I’ll supply my experience. My parents live in Qatar, which is located in the Middle East on the Arabian Peninsula. It’s a little piece of land that sticks off into the Persian Gulf. You might think that because it’s a peninsula that sticks into the Persian Gulf that there would be an abundance of water that could be used and be turned into drinking water, you’d be very wrong. If you go to any of the beaches, there is trash everywhere and it’s worse than anything in America. I was told I shouldn’t go swimming in the water because of how polluted it was and how many diseases were in it. I was told I wasn’t allowed to drink from the tap or from the refrigerator because the water would make me very ill. If you wanted clean safe water, you had to either buy packs of plastic bottles or buy the 25-gallon jugs of it. But these plastic containers of water have been sitting out in the crazy heat, allowing the plastics to leach into the water, contaminating that too (and, from what I learned from Barlow’s talk, these plastic containers of water are classified as food, so the water isn’t tested for how clean and purified it is). Going out to a restaurant, you couldn’t just get a glass of water from a soda machine, the waiters would bring out bottles of water that were imported from countries hundreds of miles away. Like so many other countries, water there is privatized, and the groundwater is not safe to drink. Luckily for me, my parents could afford to buy the jugs of water and packs of water bottles, but so many millions of people cannot so they resort to drinking contaminated groundwater. Living there and learning about all of these places that are affected by the privatization and contamination of water made me realize that people who have access to clean water really do take water for granted and we think that there is an abundance of it. If we can get out of this mindset of taking such things for granted and being practical about water, then we can help solve these two crises.