Who do Water and Air Belong to? Can Economic Reason Conserve the Planet?

A Critical Essay on Climate, Water, Human Rights and Justice

By Ümit Şahin

Who Does Water Belong to?

Bechtel, one of the world’s largest corporations, notorious for its relationship to George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden and for the evocation of its name during the Enron scandal, purchased, in October 2000, the water and sewage services of the city of Santiago de Guayaquil in Ecuador for a period of 30 years. With a population of 3 million, Guayaquil is the biggest city of Ecuador, a country of 14 million inhabitants. Seven years after privatisation, the city’s people have now started to demonstrate in protest against increasing water cuts and water pollution. Moreover, the company recently had to pay a fine of USD 1.5 million for continued breach of contract. Here are the facts about Guayaquil (Food and Water Watch, 2007):

• Water cut-offs that last up to two days
• Cut-off of the water of senior citizens and poor residents due to inability to pay
• Failure to meet contractual obligations for amelioration of the water network
• Public health problems due to lack of wastewater treatment and water cut-offs. Among these is a Hepatitis A outbreak in June 2005.

We are often told that water is a human right. But the recognition of this right is fairly recent. The United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Committee declared water to be a human right in 2002. According to this, each person must have access to safe water of sufficient quality. The right to water must be guaranteed by the public authority.

Not only water, but the issue of climate, which lies at the basis of the question of water and drought, should also be taken up from the standpoint of human rights. Wolfgang Sachs, when taking up climate change in terms of human rights, treats it as a question of intergenerational justice, as well as one of justice between people of the same generation and between countries and social sectors.

Shortly before coming to Ecuador, Bechtel had to leave Bolivia as a result of a powerful popular movement organised in Cochabamba. The threat repelled by the people of Bolivia fell upon Ecuador. A fundamental right was totally transformed into a commercial commodity, and now people are looking for ways to get rid of this corporation that has seized their water. This privatisation provides water to those who have the money to the extent that they pay the price and feels no need even to create a network for those who do not possess the means, thus constituting a clear instance of violation human rights. Is this an exception? Is water a commodity? Or is it a gift of nature to all living beings, a gift that belongs to all so that they can share it?

Water, Water Everywhere

We know the water to be found on our planet is of a fixed quantity and consists to a great part of the salt water in seas and oceans. Only 0.3% of the total water on the planet is usable fresh water out of surface sources, lakes and rivers.

As a natural outcome of this information, the most frequently heard question when people are confronted with the question of the shortage of water is why we do not eliminate the salt in sea water and use it, when we are surrounded by seas all around. The technology to eliminate salt from sea water and obtain fresh water has certainly existed for long years. Certain arid countries such as the Gulf States and Libya and insular countries such as Malta with restricted hydraulic resources make widespread use of this technology. But there is a problem. This method is extremely energy-intensive and, therefore, very expensive.

To burn fossil fuels in order to make up for the shortage of water, itself a consequence of global warming - that would be a fine instance of the dog chasing its tail, of which we have had too many examples.

Hence the question of why we do not purify sea water and use it is the expression of an outlook that is typically divorced from nature, of regarding as legitimate all change in life processes from the viewpoint of its benefit to humans and of the habit of imagining that every problem can be solved through technological fixes. The issue is not only a question of costs or the emission of carbon. The crux of the matter is how one perceives water.

It may be worth asking if the two waters, of which one would be transformed into the other, are any different.

In my opinion, the answer is truly clear: Sea water is acrid. The water that flows from springs, on the other hand, is refreshing. These are defining attributes for both sea water and spring water. A chemical operation cannot change the character of the material nor its place in the imagination.

Is Water of Infinite or Limited Quantity or is it Scarce?

When we regard water not as a gift that nature has bestowed upon us, but as a product obtained in factories, an industrial commodity, there remains no distinction between purified sea water or treated sewage water, on the one hand, and the fresh water that flows from its spring, on the other. With such an engineering outlook, one may even approach the hydraulic cycle with hostility and look for ways of changing it to the benefit of the human being or stop it all together. When recently, as a response to the fall in the water levels in dams as a consequence of evaporation due to extreme temperatures connected with global warming, the proposal was put forward to cover the surface of lakes that provide drinking water with a thin film so as to prevent evaporation, this was not regarded as bizarre. A similar technique was implemented or proposed for the Alps, in the form of dressing the melting glaciers. This is perceiving the hydraulic cycle as the atmosphere robbing us of a good which belongs to us.

For no longer is water seen as a free and shared good that belongs to all, but as a scarce economic good. This economic assumption has made water scarce and, thereby, the need for water infinite. So is water really scarce?

Some 25 or 30 years ago, in order to drink fresh and delicious water instead of tap water with a heavy content of chlorine, we would queue up in front of the several fountains in our neighbourhoods and fill our jerry cans. For the Asian coast of Istanbul, where I grew up, this was the water of Kayışdağı or Küçük Çamlıca. We would sometimes even go out of our way to stop by at the Taşdelen or the more distant Çene springs. However difficult the travelling, however much time and effort it required, these forays were worth their while, since these were lovely waters and, moreover, free of charge. The same spring water we now buy in blue-coloured plastic demijohns. This spring water that we buy - could that really be the same thing as the water that we used to fill our jerry cans with from the fountains near our neighbourhood?

When you access water as a result of labour spent and relying on tradition, together with everyone else, almost with a communal conviviality, you add value to water. This water is valuable, it cannot be wasted; perhaps it flows out of the spring ceaselessly, but it does not create a sentiment of infinity. Thus it does not provoke endless needs and therefore does not itself become scarce.

When water comes from pipes laid in houses, that is really from an unknown location, and flows pressured and ceaselessly from taps, this creates the perception that water is infinite. Fresh water resources are, however, finite and have been so throughout history. Scarcity, on the other hand, is the contradiction between the promise of more of something and the limited nature of its quantity. Scarcity is not an inner characteristic of nature, but a result of the relationship established with that object. When resources are extremely limited, scarcity may not be felt. When, on the contrary, resources are abundant, there may be a perception of extreme scarcity. This kind of relationship to things is one of the main characteristics of the modern industrial world. As Jean Robert remarks, “Although there has never existed in history a period when the amount of water accessible was so high, never before has water been so scarce” (Robert, 2003).

Water is in reality not scarce, but of finite quantity. But under present circumstances, water is at once over-abundant, and therefore squandered, and has become scarce...

Jean Robert describes the consequences of the characterisation of water as scarce in the following manner: “If access to water is regulated according to the laws of scarcity, the poor will have to bid farewell to even a drop of water. Rational as it may seem to tax industry, agriculture and individuals with excessive consumption, the access of the poor to water free of charge should be guaranteed.”

In the end, efforts are made to tear water from its cycle in nature. This is done not only on the basis of extreme proposals such as films to prevent evaporation, but also by building dams, laying levees, diverting river beds, flowing waters being channelled into concrete covered pipes or transported to big cities through tunnels. Having been torn from its natural cycle, water is inserted recklessly into the economic cycle.

Were water to be transformed completely into an economic commodity, the poor would be the first to suffer. This would happen not only because water has become a commodity that only those possessing the means can access, abandoned to the rules of the market, serving to profit from, all this resulting in the cutting off of the water of those who cannot pay their bills, but also because when demand rises, the neighbourhoods and houses where the poor live will be the first where water will not be transmitted.

Water, then, should be redefined as a common good free of charge, whose commercial use should be restricted precisely for this reason and whose industrial and agricultural use should be taxed.

Jean Robert describes the inappropriability of water in the following terms (Robert, 2003): “The basic relationship to land can be summed up by the verb ‘to own’. Water breaks down the borders of this ownership. One can never possess water. It can only be divided and distributed before it evaporates.”

Today, however, water is being redefined as a commercial commodity with the atmosphere reconfigured as a waste depository, as the former, torn from tradition, human values and history, is commodified.

Water or H2O?

Water that has been locked up in pipes, purified, processed, and reproduced is no different from an industrial good such as an antibiotic or cement. This is water that does not gush from a spring, rain from the heavens, flow form a source. The H2O that comes out of pipes has been severed from the matrix from which it comes, the soil, the sky, and culture. To borrow Ivan Illich’s terminology, H2O is not water but a technical and industrial cleaning agent, a poisonous beverage, a liquid that irritates the skin. Water has lost its power to purify, to wash away spiritual filth. H2O and water are opposites (Illich, 2007). An urban dweller no longer has the opportunity of coming into contact with living water. H2O can, for instance, even be obtained from sea water. But we posed the question a moment ago: Is salty sea water really water? If sea water is not water, the fresh water obtained through the purification of this from salt is, then, an artificial product obtained from en entity which is not water itself. This, in its turn, cannot be the same thing as the water that flows from springs and rivers. No longer is it solely its place in the imagination, as Bachelard has described it, that has changed, but its very becoming.

I use the H2O obtained from sea water only as an example. To see the H2O that is currently perceived as water, but has been commodified in all its dimensions through industrial production and economic mechanisms, as identical to the water in the common memory of humanity is the same thing as believing that one can access knowledge through schools, as moving around in motor vehicles, as receiving one’s news from television, as recovering one’s health in hospitals. What makes us get used to quenching our thirst with something that is not water is the presuppositions that the industrial system needs to have all of us adopt (Illich, 1986).

Where have the absolute presuppositions of industrialism brought us? A human condition where we have changed the climate, where we feel concerned about our future because of the threat of drought and other disasters, where the future has been lost.

When we have rejected the presuppositions of the industrial system, our soul and mind can only be purified and liberated by water flowing from springs. For this water itself has to have been previously liberated. Water returned to its own bed may, who knows, perhaps return us as well to our bed in the historic flow.

Ümit Şahin is founding member and co-chairperson of the Green Party of Turkey.

References

• Bachelard, Gaston. (2004) Su ve Düşler: Maddenin İmgelemi Üzerine Bir Deneme. Yapı Kredi Yayınları, İstanbul.

• Food and Water Watch, Bechtel Cuts Water in Ecuador (10 Ekim 2007 tarihli mektup).

• http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/ecuador/5058.html Erişim tarihi 22 Ocak 2008.

• Illich, Ivan. (1985) Okulsuz Toplum. Birey ve Toplum Yayınları, Ankara.

• Illich, Ivan. (2007) H2O ve Unutmanın Suları. Yeni İnsan Yayınları, İstanbul.

• Pierce, Fred. (2006) When The Rivers Run Dry. Beacon Pres, Boston.

• Robert, Jean. (2003) Suyun Ekonomi-Politiği. Ütopya Yayınevi, Ankara.

• Sachs, Wolfgang. (2007) İklim Değişikliği ve İnsan Hakları. Üç Ekoloji, Sayı 6, s.90-110.