Related stories:  Water Wars in the Movies

The following video consists of an online presentation by Miriam Torres of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, which helps local groups build a statewide movement for water justice and Leonardo Vilchis of Union de Vecinos, whose members in the Southeast Los Angeles city of Maywood, recently gained control of their local water company.

The presentation took place on Sunday, July 17, 2011 in my Urban Eco-Systems Thinking class in Antioch University’s new Urban Sustainability M.A. program, and goes deeply into the issues that prevent so many people in California from access to affordable and clean drinking water.

For more about the struggle for clean water in the city of Maywood, check out this video by Urban Semillas.

Related stories: The Right to Water in California

The real world event of what’s been called the Cochabamba Water Wars found its way into two recent feature films.  Cochabamba is the third largest city in Bolivia and in 1999 to 2000, the residents got organized and mobilized to stop a multi-national from privatizing their water.

Quantum of Solace released in 2008 is a James Bond, Double-Oh-Seven adventure I saw at the Cinerama Dome with by buddy, fellow mystery writer Bob Ward.  The picture has an exciting car chase for an  opener and Bond’s Bourne Identity-like close hand-to-hand combat scenes are smashing as he might say.  But the main villain in the film, Dominic Greene, is as bland as the white suits he wore.  In fact what I distinctly recall discussing with Bob after the flick was, “Man, what was up with that?  This is the franchise that gave us Goldfinger painting a woman in gold for revenge.  The German-Chinese Dr. No and his kung fu grip mechanical hands.  But Greene.  Really?!”

Anyway, Quantum deals, in part, with the on-the-nose named Greene, a member of the evil Quantum cabal that Bond is chasing down, out to control the water supply in Bolivia through his fake eco-friendly front.  There’s maybe one scene of some indigenous folks lining up for water but mostly Bolivia is represented by the fetching and deadly Bolivian secret agent Camille Montes who has a personal score to settle with her fellow countryman General Medrano, the officer instituting the coup as he’s in the pocket of Greene.  Okay, it’s a Bond film so of course he has to do the heavy lifting, but there’s not even a scene where he leads the roused Bolivian compasinos against Greene’s fortress.  I guess the producers concluded that wouldn’t be PC, the white savior showing up to lead the bedraggled brown folk — what with Bond having to exist as a kind of blunted post-Soviet Union imperialist for her majesty these days.  Or did Bond defeat Greene merely to ensure the proper allied oligarchs would control the water?

Last year’s Even the Rain, from Spain, shown in the States in art houses and at film festivals, has a lot more depth and verisimilitude going for it than 007’s last outing.  It’s a film within a film set-up and deals with a Spanish film crew arriving in Cochabamba during that fateful time to shoot a lefty film about Christopher Columbus.  Essentially they will show Columbus in a revisionist light as he exploits, enslaves and commits inhuman acts against the indios in the so-called New World – all for their gold and labor.  Indeed the focus of the story’s film is a priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, a cleric who eventually campaigned against the brutal treatment of native people.  Daniel is one of the non-actors the director Sebastian casts for the film for his Indian face and forceful way to play an historical leader named Hatuey, is also an organizer working to stop a multi-national company from privatizing their water.

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Ryan interviews Janette Bulkan, who has worked on issues of poor governance, corruption, and their negative impacts on people, the economy, and the ecology in highly forested countries for many years.
Ryan: Will you tell me a little bit about your work, globally, around issues of environmental justice?

Janette: Well, that is an ambitious way of putting it.  My work is actually just a tiny piece of it.  I did my doctoral research on forestry concessions in Guyana.  And I started off looking at the differences between forest law, forest policy, forest regulations, on the one hand, and forest practices on the other, for large-scale and small-scale forest concessions. So I was basically looking at what the law said and what the practice was.  I was actually interested in a technical study to understand what kinds of harvesting practices, or at what levels, would make sense for the very fragile forests of Guyana.  Because these are forests that are located in the poorest soils, globally,land with  just a tiny, like a quarter inch of soil, on the Guiana Shield, which is occupied by Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, parts of eastern Venezuela and northern Brazil.

But I quickly realized that, and this was back in 2006,that my study wasn’t really about law, regulation, policy vs. practice –– because those laws and regulations were adequate, actually.  Or really thoughtful in many ways.  But my study was about governance and corruption.

I graduated and I went on to teach and I am now at The Field Museum, but I’ve maintained an interest in how these processes play out and affect the most marginalized peoples who live in these frontier areas as in Guyana and in Suriname.

So last year, this initiative called the LDPI –– the Land Grab –– the Land Deal Politics Initiative –– invited me to do a paper on the role of Chinese companies and the state of China, the government of China, in resource grabbing in Guyana. And I completed that paper, of course, before I came to the Field Museum.  After that, the LDPI, this Land Deal Politics Initiative, which is a consortium of the Futures Agriculture Unit in the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Cornell University in the U.S.A., the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and I think the University of South Africa.  This consortium raised funding to have a three-day conference on resource grabbing and land grabbing.  They made it possible for me to attend that by covering the cost of my airfare.  And that took place between the 8th and the 10th of April at the University of Sussex in England.

And it was really a moving experience, an intellectually very stimulating experience, but also an experience, I think, where scholars at different places in their career trajectories came together to think about these issues, globally and locally.  So I think the conference had accepted 120 papers for presentation and they had to turn away over 250 excellent papers because of the limitations of time and the actual venue that was chosen.  It’s a very small space in which to have a conference.  And it was only really possible because of excellent administrative arrangements by the University of Sussex, IDS.

Of those 120 papers, they represented people, researchers from 69 universities and 29 independent institutions.  And 17 of them were Africa-based scholars.  So this was all facilitated, in doing this work, by the LDPI, the Land Grab Deal Politics Initiative. And I think it cumulatively began to address an issue that is happening very quickly, which is the consolidation of land under long term lease arrangements between governments and large corporations in parts of our world in which there are no immediate possibilities of questioning –– what are the mechanisms under which this is done, who benefits, who are the winners, who are the losers, what does the State gain, is  it really about food security at the local level, or does something else play out.

So that conference, the LDPI Conference of 6th to 8th of April, isn’t meant to be one off.  There’s a website, on which all the papers are posted.  It’s meant to be a website in which you can upload other things, you can upload other papers and continue a conversation around these issues, because this phenomenon of land grabbing –– a new enclosure movement –– globally, is happening fast, and happening in a way that it is not on the radar screen of many people.

So we’re thinking about what are the implications of this land grabbing for us, wherever we are globally.  And what are the implications for the most marginalized peoples in these far-off places, who are experiencing that new phenomenon in their daily lives.  And what does all of this mean, in our globalized world which is also subject to rapidly changing climate?  Are we, in fact, thinking about these things deeply when we allow corporate decisions to determine land use and access.

Ryan: So, what exactly is land grabbing?

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Once upon a time I was lucky enough to move into a house with a small and completely overgrown garden. So my then-partner Manny and I decided we would reclaim it and try to grow as much of our own food as possible. Just to learn what that would take.

We grew some delicious vegetables — and if you know me that will make you laugh — but I deeply enjoyed them after they were cooked. We had loquats and kumquats and pomegranates. We had fresh eggs from the chickens we also raised up there in the Forgotten Edge, perched between Echo Park and Chinatown. But what we managed to grow? I’m afraid it was nowhere near enough to sustain us and this is partly why (apart from size, as of course that does matter).

Grocery stores have brutally erased the agricultural seasons for us, so you have to relearn a lot (which also means your diet and your cooking repertoire have to completely change). You can’t plant seeds all at once, rather you have to do it in waves, so as to have a continuous harvest. Preparation of the ground is key: digging deep, breaking up clay (of which we had tons and it sucked but it sure as hell was better than caliche), adding what you can to improve its lightness along with your organic fertilizer which should come as much as possible from your own compost pile.

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What does hip-hop legend J-Live have in common with the billionaire ultra-conservative Koch brother?

Not much. Expect perhaps that they both work hard and are here to stay.

J-Live’s “Give It Up” is basically a hip-hop anthem for the climate action movement. It runs through the core concepts of climate change, warns that if we don’t wish to live on Mars then something serious has to change.

You can listen to it here, and I highly suggest that you do. Through powerful lyrics, flow, and production, the longstanding indie MC boils down everything you need to know about global warming into 5 minutes of eye-opening entertainment. It’s art meets science at its highest.

Ok, so where do the Koch brothers fit in? They are wealth meets politics at its lowest. While J-Live deploys the power of hip-hop to inspire people to protect mother nature, David and Charles Koch are busy deploying the power of their incredible wealth to fund attacks on any environmental regulations that might threaten their oil regime. In a recent New Yorker article, investigative journalist Jane Myer exposes the downright nasty funding strategy of a family that gives philanthropy a bad name. A real bad name.

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At the same time that protests have erupted all over France regarding national cutbacks of the country’s historic social safety net, there is a local example of experimenting with policies to redress inequality.

I recently visited the French city of Lille where I was struck by the citywide initiatives to create a more socially and spatially just place for its residents.

(Wikimedia Commons-Author: Manchot Sanguinaire)

Situated in the North of France, practically on the Belgian border, Lille is at the heart of a region that boomed during the industrial revolution primarily through its word-renowned textile industry as well as important coal, mechanical and chemical production. The region essentially knew steadfast economic growth until the deindustrialization crisis hit in the 1960s-1970s, when jobs moved to Asia and left the northern textile region in ruin. It has been struggling ever since to recover its economy and its declining population as well as dealing with an important legacy of environmental degradation born out of its heavy industrial production.

Aerial view of Lille  (Wikimedia Commons – Author: JÄNNICK Jérémy)

Lille has faired better than most other industrial cities in the region thanks primarily to a slow conversion to a service-based economy with the arrival of the Eurostar in 1993, but also, thanks to a string of ambitious socialist mayors who have governed the city since the late 19^th century. (Note: “socialist” in the French context refers to the main leftist party of France, The Parti Socialiste, and not to what U.S. tea-party-people would call socialism…).

Euralille: the symbol of Lille’s conversion to a service-based economy (Wikemedia Commons – author: Ad62)

Despite huge efforts to rebuild the economy and reclaim an identity for itself however, Lille and its surrounding urban region continue to suffer from higher than average unemployment rates and lower per capita incomes than the national French average. There are still many poor ex-industrial areas which suffer from poor housing, poor services and infrastructure as well as the repercussions from is sometimes refered to in France as the “lost generation” – the generation of factory workers who lost their jobs during the post-war crisis and never got them back.

However Lille’s mayors, particularly the current one Martine Aubry, have made important efforts to ensure that the redevelopment of the city and its economy benefit all “lillois”, rather than accepting the first offer that comes in order to make a few quick bucks (see for example the way Detroit has been run since its automotive collapse)

In this way, important efforts have been made to create a more inclusive and more sustainable city for all.

Last July, my research took me to Lille where I interviewed several local actors, including Ari Brodach, the City’s Director of Sustainable Development.  He told me an anecdote that beautifully encapsulates Lille’s efforts to create an “eco-social” city.

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Since BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion this spring, over 5 million barrels of oil have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. Animals, humans, states and entire industries have been devastated. Meanwhile, the conditions which lead to this catastrophe have gone largely unaddressed.

Off shore drilling is still seen as a legitimate way for us to meet our energy needs, and we continue to burn through unbelievable amounts of this finite fuel. What does this tell us about the world we live in today? For starters, it shows that the real crisis goes much deeper than any single disaster.

Our entire economy runs on the consumption of fossil fuels, a dependence which places us at the mercy of companies like BP and endangers the sustainability of life as we know it. This last oil spill is one overwhelming indicator that this way of life cannot last, that our culture and economy must change.

Fortunately, the change that we need so badly can begin in our homes, and it can begin with us. According to experts like Energy Savvy, the energy lost in the BP spill is roughly equivalent to the energy wasted every year by 75,000 homes. By weatherizing our homes and retrofitting our neighborhoods, we can start to take meaningful actions that reduce our dependence on oil. And weatherization is only one example.

In this video explaining the BP oil spill, Lisa See Kim and Ryan Hollon illustrate alternative routes to meeting our energy demands.  Crude Awakenings points to changes we can make as a society to reduce our dependence on oil, whether that means changing where we get our food or investing in solar and wind power.

Whether these actions are supported the government or come from grassroots coalitions, what matters most is that they happen. For the more energy-efficient our world becomes, the less power Big Oil has over how we live our lives.

For more information on the problem and solutions check out:

Gulf Spill is Largest of It’s Kind, Scientist Say, New York Times

Energy Action Coalition is a coalition of 50 youth-led environmental and social justice groups working together to build the youth clean energy and climate movement.

Chicago’s Energy Action Network expands winter heating assistance services in neighborhoods and encourage residents to save money year-round through energy efficiency measures and programs.

Alliance for Climate Education educates high school students on the science behind climate change and inspires them to take action to curb the causes of global warming.

Report: Energy efficiency can save oil, avoid dangerous drilling, Grist

Farm Together Now is a new book (December 2010) by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker who visited 20 urban and rural farmers around the country to provide a vision of real alternatives to oil-dependent industrial agriculture.  We’ll let you know when the book is available, but meanwhile, you can check out Amy and Dan’s website.

Every Sunday and holiday, about 80 miles of the main streets of Bogota are blocked off from cars for most of the day so that bicyclists, runners, skaters, and pedestrians can take over the streets.  The ciclovias are used by about 2 million people – about 30% of the population and are surrounded by other events on park stages – concerts, yoga and aerobic instructions, and other performances.

And now, Los Angeles, the least likely suspect, whose endless concrete and streets have been the butt of urban critique for devoting most of the public space in the city to cars instead of people is on the verge of launching its own – CicLAvia – an event to be held on September 12 if all goes as planned.

“L.A. doesn’t have enough public space…of the largest cities in the U.S., L.A. is the most park-poor,” says Aaron Paley, CicLAvia advocate, in a video on Kickstarter, the social entrepreneur venture capital network. (What could be more Do-It-Together?  Venture capital from anyone who can give $1 a more).

“But we do have these fantastic streets.  And the streets already belong to us.  And by turning the streets over to the people on a Sunday we create temporary parks overnight without any large investment.”

Aaron is a professional animator of public spaces and runs a company that is, ironically, called CARS (Community Arts Resources).  He makes festivals, events, and turns concrete in L.A. into places where people dance, and, sing and play together.  He’s a friend and we were Stanton Fellows together (a great program that helps social entrepreneurs create their own project – sorry, only in L.A.).  He was researching and investigating and noodling about a new idea for public space, ended up in Bogota, and came back as a ciclovia evangelist.

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As of December 15, these necessary demands are not doing too well at COP 15.  Check out Gopal Dayaneni’s video blog from the Right to the City Alliance, which lays out the issues in a clear and concise way.

From Copenhagen: