Maude Barlow is a member of OCA’s Policy Advisory Board. For related articles and more information please visit OCA’s Environment and Climate Resource Center.

Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even
in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers
Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. Barlow, a
former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the
Council of Canadians
and founder of the Blue Planet Project. Barlow is a contributor to AlterNet’s forth-coming bookWater Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource.

We
all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global
climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil,
causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold
millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in
peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South,
in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The
atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last
several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on
course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit)
by 2100.

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our
ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only
10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea
are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a
prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier
left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were
destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a
rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According
to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity
deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate
faster than Nature can create new ones.

We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.