Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice 202 Harvard SE Albuquerque, NM 87106 505-268-9557   Updated: 28 August 2009 Newsletter September 2009
September 2009 Newsletter Contents Excerpt from "Who Says You Can't ... Unjust Planet" Membership Application	Excerpt from "Who Says You Can't Change the World? Just Economies and Societies on an Unjust Planet" by Beverly Bell and the Other Worlds Collaborative Water Water Everywhere (Claiming and Protecting Water) A surge of people power in parts of the world, especially Latin America, is beginning to ensure that water is protected as part of the global commons, making it free or cheap, accessible, clean, and democratically managed. The last few years have seen popular pressure win new legal precedents, constitutional guarantees, and types of management. The size of the movement represents the scope of what's at stake. Mark Twain said, "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over." Never mind that it is an essential element of life. In case after case around the world, water has been turned into a profit making commodity. Municipal water systems today are often controlled by distant corporations and stock markets. Combined with pollution and government mismanagement, this has caused dire water poverty and scarcity around the planet. Results include people being unable to pay for drinking water, rivers no longer flowing, and outbreaks of diseases like cholera. Several principles are behind the rising wave: Water is the patrimony of humanity and nature, and therefore should not be sold to private hands. Governments must protect universal access to water, which may not be based on ability to pay. The people - or an accountable representative in the state, union, and/or citizens' organization - must have democratic input into its use and protection. By necessity, but also driven by a different vision, citizens are both effectively resisting threats and creating alternatives. Here are just a few examples: In April 2008, the grassroots group Coalition against Water Privatization won a landmark lawsuit, granting people in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, South Africa, the legal right to have double the free tap water they were getting without the burden of pre-payment meters. An appeals court ruling later weakened the legal right, but the Coalition against Water Privatization is confident that the highest court in the land will strengthen the judgment, once the case is heard later in 2009. Constitutions in South Africa, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia now enshrine water as a human right, making it harder for delivery systems to be sold into private hands. In Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, El Salvador, and Italy, advocates are working toward the same goal with their respective constitutions. Communities across the U.S. and Canada have triumphed against sweetheart deals that allowed Nestlé to pump and bottle water from rivers, lakes and aquifers and then sell it for 1,000 times the cost of tap water. They have done this by convincing town councils and planning commissions to back out of deals (Maine), mounting successful legal challenges (Michigan), and making Nestlé look so bad that it had to scale back its projects (California). After years of public pressure, the local government in Kerala, India, ruled that residents' access to water trumped that of corporate power and ordered a highly polluting and water-consuming Coca-Cola plant to close down in 2005. The Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations in Honduras has successfully utilized the courts and direct action to stop corporations from building hydroelectric plants. These plants would have flooded Maya-Lenca lands and limited the use of the rivers that people have depended on for eons. Elsewhere around the world, people are bringing their water back - or preserving what water they do have - through conservation, ecological sanitation systems, reforestation, rainwater collection, watershed protection, and more. They are fighting dams (which, by disrupting the water's natural flow, have the potential to disrupt the surrounding ecosystem and literally drown nearby communities), pollution, and other forms of destruction to this precious part of nature. In a world where wealth, resources, and political power are usually concentrated in a small group, the crest of water victories shows what highly informed and organized popular movements can do. In most parts of the world, water privatization is still the dominant trend, but we are seeing that we can create other options and change this flow. To learn more about this publication, call (505) 349-5563 or visit www.otherworldsarepossible.org .
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