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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Sophisticated terrorists know that a community’s front line depends on its water infrastructure. One of the greatest betrayals of the residents of Los Angeles in this time of perfect firestorms was when there was no water left to protect people’s homes.
Terrorists hit targets that can shatter the trust. And there are few things more powerful, more symbolic, more important than water security. Having just experienced that fragility, that threat from our shifting climate – droughts and wildfires exacerbated by floods that allowed tinder-dry fuels to proliferate, Angelenos should now be hyper-aware of the risks posed by their vulnerable water infrastructure.
Even a contained attack on drinking water could have a disproportionate political response, declaring a nationwide state of emergency, mass arrests, shutting down news and social media, controlling information, curfews, shoot-to-kill, dictatorship, a coup.
But the dangers associated with water access go much deeper. Delve deep into history, the ability to control waterways and the access to water supplies.
Documentation of bygone days reveal regions and eras with people co-existing in both rural and populous metropolises in fairly democratic manners managing sharing resources and caring for the least powerful.
But, too frequently, inequality prevailed, and a privileged minority exploited everyone else. Many times those in command were invaders or of a specific caste, color, or religion.
Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed in the power of emotions; his writings fathered the French Revolution as well as the appreciation of nature and the arts.
He identified the movement of people from the extended families of hyper-local agrarian societies and groups of hunter-gatherers where interdependence and maintaining respect for each other was key to survival to larger towns and cities where some people became disposable, and a power of hierarchy was established that resulted in competition, exploitation, and wars.
Ultimately, in focusing on the group instead of individual profit, the family unit is the epitome of the purest form of communism, operating on the Karl Marx dictum: “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”
Can you think of anyone who would respect a family that ejects a sick child or an elderly aunt because they are no longer “revenue-generating assets”?
Can Californians expand that family to a neighborhood, city, and state level where we all are no longer strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other?
One thing is certain. That can only happen with true water equity, both within and beyond our borders.
Historically, communities with their own clean water source and the secondary ability to grow food and maintain animals had the ability to survive long sieges.
Environmental injustice is epitomized in the disparity of drinking water access here, across the country and abroad.
In the Los Angeles area Blue Triton, which has recently merged with another multinational water abuser to become Primo Brands and counts among its San Bernardino National Forest spring-stealing predecessors Nestlé, Perrier, Coca Cola, Standard Oil, Rheem Manufacturing, and Arrowhead Water, has been finally brought to bay by local environmentalists and water activists for its illegal draining of local water especially during periods of extreme drought.
Looking at that list of corporate conglomerates, it is clear that water rustling is a very profitable business model. And one that is not in the best interests of the people or the environment.
Corporate water takeovers have plagued many other states, with greedy-guts commercial empires leveraging political might to steal essential resources from residents at the expense of ratepayers through the privatization and exploitation of what should be a basic human right.
Pennsylvania, Hawai’i, Australia, New Mexico, the Middle East… environmental abuses are considered the leading criminal activity worldwide following the trade in drugs and weapons.
In the United States as globally, sophisticated legal teams collude with elected and appointed officials to profiteer off the poor and destitute. As well as the rich who may be better situated to endure augmented price gouging.
Back in California, Central Valley agribusinesses, so beloved of our Fearless Felon in his attack against Governor Newsom, continue to suck up federally funded water at the expense of Angelenos who were running for their lives as their homes and businesses burned.
Water, the new liquid gold, squandered on crops unsuitable for the state’s semi-arid setting which will only become more so as global warming increases.
And Wall Street’s Big Ag faves in California’s fertile crescent continue to push out smaller farmers and residents from their homes as their wells dry up due to this corporate-funded overdrawing of a water table that, between their greed and SoCal suburbanites’ lust for lush green lawns, has been drained of over 40 trillion gallons in the past century.
That’s enough fresh water to provide every person on Earth with a 30-year supply of drinking water.
And then there are the extractive industries and factory and farm pollution of groundwater; ravaged by coal mining and oil spills, fracking wastewater, run-offs flush with animal antibiotics, toxic levels of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, noxious muddles of industrial poisons – like from the Exide facility in east Los Angeles…
You name it and you’ll find it, most likely in areas like east Los Angeles and Louisiana’s Cancer Alley where inhabitants have neither the skills nor the money to fight back against corporate behemoths whose stockholders benefit as lives are lost.
Even when regulations are passed, they tend to serve wealthier communities whose residents can demand timely enforcement. Widening economic disparities.
Then there are situations like government “efficiencies” such as led to Michigan condemning the children of the poor in the downtown core of Flint to permanent brain damage. Reducing their ability to fight their way out of the ghetto and further widening disparities.
We all need water. Water to drink, water to grow food, water to maintain an ecological balance, water for recreation… and water to put out wildfires.
And control of water must be repatriated from the wealthy and powerful to stop its commodification, its use in fracking oil and cooling heat-generating industrial processes at the expense of societal survival.
World leaders must fight to reverse monopolization and trade in water, especially in this era of climate change, where droughts drive farmers from their land, push mass emigration, and escalate wars that may lead to mankind’s extinction.
Water must be maintained as a common good for all Americans, for all people worldwide.
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
