| http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=11874
Geov Parrish WorkingForChange 09.06.01 Arctic wild idea preserved The need for water is quenching the money thirst of companies who control it For most global justice advocates, the downside of corporate- friendly supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank, NAFTA, or the Free Trade Area of the Americas evokes industry: sweatshops, maquiladoras, exploited workers, and trampled local autonomy to pass laws that inconvenience big corporations. Others have warned of the drive for universal privatization of the public sector. Liberalization of the flow of money is another danger area. But there's still another front on which this war will be waged, and it's one on which the rules are being written now, with consequences around the world that could add up to a most dire 21st Century: Water. Fresh, potable water to quench the thirst of the world's billions will replace oil very soon -- if it hasn't already -- as the scarce resource over which wars are fought, fortunes made, and people die. The politics of water are an essential, if often overlooked, part of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But soon enough, it won't be an issue of which countries control water; thanks to agreements like the WTO, irreplaceable fresh water supplies will be a prize fought over by corporations. A particularly appalling example is coming to life in North America, where enormous cities are sprawling in deserts, sucking water tables, aquifers, and whole river systems dry. Los Angeles, San Diego/Tijuana, Phoenix, Las Vegas, et al. are unnatural phenomena. Los Angeles with a million people would have been impossible without the Sierra Nevada's water; its megalopolis of 20 million was created, along with Phoenix and Las Vegas, by diverting every last drop of the mighty Colorado. Soon, that won't be enough, either. Enter an idea that was dismissed as destructive and insane when it was first proposed 40 years ago: The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). When a Pasadena engineering firm first proposed NAWAPA in 1964, it was a specific idea to divert the "wasted" water flowing north and west in Arctic watersheds like the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers to the parched Southwest deserts. It quickly spread to encompass "wasted" fresh water across the Canadian arctic: shipping water to the Great Lakes and U.S. Midwest, building an enormous dam to separate Hudson Bay from James Bay and its 20 tributaries, creating an enormous system of dams throughout northern Quebec. The latter came to pass, partially, but further plans by Hydro- Quebec to dam various Quebec river systems were defeated in the early 1990s by environmentalists -- who pointed to the first stages of the project, built in the early 1970s, for evidence that the effects upon the environment were both unpredictable and catastrophic -- and by the Innu, Inuit, and other indigenous peoples whose lands were slated for drowning. The scheme was defeated not in Canada, but in the U.S.: by getting the states of New York and Vermont to cancel their contracts to buy the resulting hydroelectric power, thus causing financiers to pull out of construction. Most of America's big, landscape-changing megaprojects of the early 20th century would never pass muster today; too many endangered species, too few remaining wild places. And NAWAPA was of a scale that would dwarf such projects: a canal system stretching from the Arctic to Northern Mexico, depriving the Arctic of much of its fresh water supply. It sounds insane, and impossible. Enter NAFTA and WTO, and the need for water. NAWAPA, dead for decades, is stirring again. Alaska Sen. Ernest Gruening has endorsed it. A lot of big corporations are interested. Think tanks and campuses are churning out papers on how to make it happen. The key is that provinces like Alberta and British Columbia may no longer be able to control their fresh water, nor stop a megaproject simply because it's environmentally catastrophic. If such a case were to go to the WTO -- which hands down rulings on the permissibility of laws based solely on whether they interfere with cross-border trade -- it would almost certainly lose. Construction costs would be enormous -- NAWAPA might take 30 years and $100 billion to build -- but the profits even bigger, and indefinite. Or, at least, until the water ran out. Where NAWAPA stirs, other insane-sounding plans are surely not far behind. The key to stopping any or all of them lies in making it unprofitable -- as when, for Hydro-Quebec's James Bay II project, their customers declined -- or ensuring that laws protecting the environment, native peoples, and whole communities can be enforced. Under one variation of NAWAPA, the entire city of Prince George, B.C. (pop. 70,000) would be flooded. That's the kind of muscle being put behind these projects. To stop them, activists and campuses and think tanks on "our" side -- the side that doesn't think greed should trump, or drown, everything -- had also better start paying attention. |
