The Rhetoric of Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008)

 

To move toward a solution to this conflict between profit and need, Blue Gold establishes the problem and supports it with illustrations from around the world. Our water is in crisis, a title card explains, and a World Social Forum in Nairobi is examining the evidence to determine the best ways to ensure water is available and affordable for everyone. According to Maude Barlow, fresh water only comprises three percent of the total water on Earth; yet, most of that is undrinkable because it is polluted by farmers, cars, and industrial wastes that cause miscarriages, low sperm rates, and disease. The Rio Grande River in the United States, for example, is so polluted that anyone entering it would need eighteen vaccines and shots to survive. Around the world, cholera, a water-borne disease, kills more than wars because of this overt pollution, and over 60 percent of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed. 

According to the documentary, the water crisis is a product not only of water pollution; however, it also is a repercussion of the mining for water by industry, farming, and the bottled water corporations. The world’s fresh water supply is becoming polluted so fast that corporations are mining it faster than it can be replenished. Individuals, factory owners, and farmers overuse groundwater, sometimes because of the doctrine of prior appropriation that states if farmers or factory owners do not use the water, they may lose their water rights. Urbanization and overdevelopment accelerates groundwater depletion because a paved land devastates the water cycle. Dam projects exacerbate the problem, according to Vandana Shiva, “choking the artery of the planet” and breaking a sustainable water cycle. 

To overcome this water crisis, Blue Gold declares that we need to work on a renewable supply and determine how much we really have to work with and live within those limits. The film asserts that water should be a public commons rather than a privatized source of profit, as it is now around the world—with help from big companies such as Veolia, Suez, Vivendi, and Nestle. The last scenes of the film highlight ways to solve this water crisis. A final documentary chapter, “The Way Forward,” introduces multiple examples of local residents usurping the power of these corporate giants. Uruguay rid itself of the Suez Water Treatment Company by changing its constitution. And Fryeburg, Maine poured Nestlé’s bottled water back into its aquifers. The film ends here, but the suggestion is that together, and primarily on a local level, the water crisis can be solved. Although these hopes seem unattainable as climate crises exacerbate droughts, the rhetoric of the film still resonates.