July 14, 2008 Maude Barlow, internationally acclaimed author and activist regarding the human right to water, will speak at York County Community College in Wells, Maine on Sunday July 20th at 7pm. Maude is coming to Southern Maine to discuss her international experience in the global movement against the corporate control of the world’s water supplies.
Maude Barlow just published, “Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water”. “Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert. Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities who will sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remote parts of the world left or sucked from the clouds by machines, while the poor die in increasing numbers. This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course,” writes Barlow from recently released Blue Covenant.
While in the Northeast, Barlow will highlight the relevance of her international experiences to local efforts by citizens to maintain local and democratic control over their water supply.
In Southern Maine, there has been particular concern about the impact of a proposed contract between Nestlé Waters North America and the Water District of Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells. Protests and local resistance to the contract have moved the District’s Board of Trustees to indefinatly postpone any decisions about the contract. Farther north, residents of Shapleigh are concerned about a potential partnership between the town and the multi-national that would lead towards large-scale water mining in their town.
With Nestlé, the local and global are connected since Poland Spring is a subsidiary of Nestlé S.A., the Swiss multinational corporation which is the largest packaged food corporation in the world.
“Maude expresses what so many of us feel in our gut about the world around us,” says Emily Posner, organizer for Maine’s Defending Water for Life Campaign. “She globalizes our local struggles and localizes global movements for social and ecological justice. I invite everyone to this free public event at the York County Community College.”
York County Community College is located at 112 College Drive, Wells, Maine
Maude Barlow’s visit to Southern Maine is sponsored by Save Our H2O, Defending Water for Life and Peace Action Maine.
