Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water: Maude Barlow, Tony Clarke
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The world’s water supply is fast falling prey to corporate desire for the bottom line, the authors argue (Barlow chairs Council of Canadians, a public advocacy group; Clarke is the director of the Polaris Institute of Canada). Indeed, “the human race has taken water for granted and massively misjudged the capacity of the earth’s water systems to recover from our carelessness,” the authors write. Even if that’s a hard statement to prove, the authors marshal an impressive amount of evidence that corporate profits are increasingly drinking up precious water resources. In some countries, water has already been privatized, leading to higher rates of consumption and depleted resources. And in other places, poorer residents actually pay more for water than their richer neighbors. In the meantime, Pepsi and Coke’s sales of bottled water are taking water away from municipal supplies. The authors cogently argue that water a basic necessity should be treated differently from other commodities and not placed into private hands. In the end, their argument becomes a screed against the power that multinationals wield in our economically liberalizing world: in free trade treaties, they argue, governments effectively yield control over water rights to corporations, with harmful consequences for both economic parity and nature. The authors are vague about what the average person can do to help stave off this crisis, but those concerned about the environment and about the costs of economic globalization will find much to get riled up about in this book.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This well-researched book provides a sobering, in-depth look at the growing scarcity of fresh water and the increasing privatization and corporate control of this nonrenewable resource. Barlow, national volunteer chair of the Council of Canadians, and Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute of Canada and chair of the committee on corporations for the International Forum on Globalization, describe how transnational corporations (Bechtel, Vivendi, et al.) through their water subsidiaries are making water a growth industry for the 21st century. The authors criticize mandatory privatization of water services as a condition of debt rescheduling and proposed international trade agreements for negatively impacting public ownership of water, public-sector water services, and governmental authority to regulate. Although the investigative reporting is similar to that in Marq de Villiers’s Water and Jeffrey Rothfeder’s Every Drop for Sale, the authors’ sophisticated economic analysis of water as a scarce commodity distinguishes this book from the other two. The concluding chapters set forth goals, principles for safeguarding the world’s water, and steps for water security in more detail than de Villiers’s water strategies. The proposals for corrective legislation, lobbying, and citizen environmental action make this book a highly recommended purchase for public and academic libraries. Margaret Aycock, Gulf Coast Environmental Lib., Beaumont, TX
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.