July 28. World Day for the human right to water and the right to life. Ensuring life against the irresponsibility of predators
Riccardo Petrella on the fight for the right to water at a global scale
Riccardo Petrella, pressenza.com, 28 July 2024
Today, the world’s rivers, from the largest to the smallest, are a source of great concern. Most of them are in a critical ecological state.
River crisis, crisis of the right to water and health, crisis of the res publica.
This is evident in terms of:
– their flow: many of the major rivers no longer carry water to the sea. The most famous example is Colorado, which irrigates 6 American states and provides water to 40 million people. In Africa, this is the Moulouya, a 520 km long Moroccan river, the richest in biodiversity in the country, and the Okavango, the third longest river in southern Africa, which runs aground in the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. The same goes for the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, the two great rivers of Central Asia that once fed the Aral Sea… There are hundreds of smaller rivers that no longer reach the sea;
– their water levels : they have dropped so much that even the Rhine, Europe’s main commercial river, has had to reduce navigation, and its future looks bleak. The Po, Italy’s main river, has also been at risk of drying up completely for years (within the next thirty years or even sooner). According to the National Integrated Drought Information System, in October 2022, over 44% of American rivers were in a state of drought. In 2022 and 2023, the Mississippi was hit by extreme drought. In Brazil, in October 2023, the Rio Negro, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, was almost dry. The situation is similar for the Loire, the Yangtze and, to a lesser extent, the Danube…;
– water pollution : this is undoubtedly the most striking and dramatic aspect of the global crisis affecting rivers, and water in general. The most polluted river in the world, across all categories, by all types of pollutants (especially chemical, among the countless urban, human, industrial and agricultural waste), is the Citarum, the longest river on the island of Java, in Indonesia. You can find everything there, from garbage to refrigerators, from DVDs to mattresses, from building materials to clothes. In some places, the surface of the river is so clogged with waste that you can’t even see the water. Next on the list of the ten most polluting rivers in the world is the Ganges , in India, which provides water to over 500 million people! Its tributaries are also extremely polluted (as in the case of the Yamuna, for which in 2017 the Indian Supreme Court recognized the legal personality, as for the Ganges, with the aim of intensifying the fight against its total degradation). The water is 3,000 times more polluted than the WHO recommendations.
In third place is the Yellow River in China, the second longest river in the country and a major casualty of China’s explosive economic and industrial growth over the past four decades. In fourth and fifth place are the Rio Doce in Brazil, also known as the Dead River after two dams burst, causing a giant mudflow containing some 60 million tons of iron waste, and the Niger River in Nigeria, whose oil exploitation is the main culprit in its deplorable state.
The Marilao River in the Philippines (6th ), whose water is no longer drinkable, is heavily contaminated with heavy metals from gold processing plants, which have contributed to the degradation of the surrounding environment and the health of exposed people. The Matanza-Riachuelo River (Argentina) (7th) also owes its place to about 1,200 factories that dump their waste into it, containing all types of heavy metals that are highly dangerous to human health.
The last three places in the list of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world are occupied by the Jordan (8th), an emblematic river of the Middle East and of the three great religions of the same book (Jewish, Christian and Islamic), mainly due to wastewater discharges; the Cuyahoga, in the United States (9th), which, due to the quantity of toxic products discharged into its waters, caught fire! And, also in the United States, the Mississippi (10th), which fortunately, thanks to its length (3,780 km) is not polluted everywhere, but is nevertheless seriously affected along much of its course by industrial pollution and large quantities of fertilizers and pesticides from the gigantic agricultural companies in the region(1).
If we take into account the ranking of the 10 most polluted countries in the world in terms of the quantity of plastic present in their waters, we should add to those already mentioned, the Yangtze (formerly the Blue River), which supplies water to over 600 million Chinese, the Zhu Jiang (or Pearl River), also in China, the Indus , which connects Pakistan to China, the Mekong, in South-East Asia, and the Nile (2);
– cooperative cross-border and transnational management of the world’s major river basins. There are 44 large multinational river basins in the world (3). Despite the sometimes serious conflicts between the main users of shared waters, especially in the case of transboundary rivers (e.g. Senegal, Rhine, Danube, etc.), it is difficult to speak of a real war between riparian states. Certainly, the hundreds of organizations created in the last fifty years by national and international authorities in every continent of the planet have helped to prevent conflicts from turning into “suicide wars”. However, it is regrettable that these same organizations have not been able to date, with rare exceptions, to ensure genuine political and socio-cultural cooperation in the “supranational” management of water. I do not believe that this is mainly due to “nationalist” considerations. My hypothesis refers to other factors that I consider more important, namely the fact that their ruling classes share the same utilitarian economic-financial market conception/ideology of “their” water as a resource, an economic good of strategic importance for the interests of wealth and power of local oligarchies. This is what makes them incapable and refractory to the idea of cooperatively managing and sharing their common water resources at an ecological, human, social and political level.
This brings us to the last point:
– the predominant vision of water and rivers . Like all other forms of life – water, air, forests, soil, habitat, knowledge, mobility… – rivers are today considered a “natural capital” that can be monetized, appropriated and used privately and from which the greatest possible profits can be extracted, in particular as a source of hydroelectric, nuclear or biomass energy production. For this reason, more than 58,700 large dams have been built around the world (4). Two considerations need to be made on this subject. The first concerns the dams themselves which, as scientists have been warning us for decades, have become one of the main factors in the degradation of rivers and river basins. Even the World Bank has recognized, 40 years late, that one of the main challenges for the immediate future in the field of water is the management (modernization, repair, demolition, abandonment, etc.) of the 19,000 large obsolete dams at risk of collapse and other infrastructure accidents. The second concerns the significant shift in use in favor of energy uses. In the order of priorities for water use. For centuries, the ethical and political code of priorities for water use has consisted, throughout the world, in placing water for drinking and hygiene (and, therefore, health) in absolute first place, then water for agriculture/local food, then industry followed by energy in fourth place. Today, it is increasingly the case, in case of water scarcity, that use for energy production is imposed, de facto, by public and economic authorities as a priority, followed by industrial uses, then agriculture and, finally, domestic uses (drinking water and hygiene). The explosion in commercial drinking water consumption in plastic bottles – 360 billion bottles used in 2023) – was likely a factor that facilitated the marriage.
Countering the historical irresponsibility of dominant powers: the universal right to water/life of the Earth’s inhabitants and the right of water/nature to life.
The structural change in the value of water, in which the universal right to drinking water and sanitation (and health) and water/nature as a global public good essential for life are lost, constitutes a complete theft of life for all. It is a logical consequence of the devastation and degeneration of rivers and lakes, the arteries of life on Earth.
The “masters of life” today care little about the crisis of rivers and water, apart from the issue of short-term water security to ensure the efficiency/profitability of their wealth and their dominion. In any case, they are convinced that they will emerge unscathed from the water shortage, thanks to their dominion over the global financial system and the development of the new technological world based on Artificial Intelligence. Without considering that this will not necessarily be the case for the other billions of people already left aside. Furthermore, they count in the long term on the ability of scientists, engineers and techno-managers of the system to build a new system of arteries of life on Earth through the gradual construction of a system of “intelligent artificial global water channels.” Those in Europe, particularly within the European Commission, who talk about building an intelligent Europe of water give the impression of being, without knowing it, the first slave servants of this new intelligent artificialization of water as a source of life.
The Vision 28 July proposal symbolically focused on the celebration of July 28 as “World Day for the Universal Right to Water and Wastewater Treatment”, is an initiative of international mobilization to re-irrigate the life of the Earth by fighting in defense of a double right , that of human beings to water-life and that of water-nature to life. Through the struggles of the 19th and 20th centuries, workers managed to give legitimacy and constitutional powers to the right to work in opposition to the theft of life by industrial capital. Today, it is time – as we have seen from the analysis of the crisis of rivers and basins, arteries of life on Earth – to fight for the right to water and other common goods essential to life, in opposition to the theft of natural and artificial life by capital in the 21st century.
To this end, a first step: give priority to law, to the rule of law, eliminating the unhealthy priority given to finance/enrichment, to the state of power, and mobilize in favor of the recognition of the legal personality of rivers and other bodies/ecosystems of the Earth, following the paths opened in recent years in Asia (India), Oceania (New Zealand), South America (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru), North America (Canada/Quebec, United States), Europe (Spain) … These paths have led to the recognition of the legal personality of rivers as legal persons, with the aim of defending the rights of the community of life constituted by the territories irrigated by the rivers. They are important signs of the opening of new local and planetary horizons for a peaceful and just coexistence of the global community of life on Earth.
Notes
(1) Main source of information: https://www.topito.com/top-10-des-fleuves-les-plus-pollues-du-monde-leau-de-la-honte
See also https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/planete-ou-plastique/les-dix-fleuves-du-monde-qui-charrient-le-plus-de-plastique
(2) https://nourriture-survie.fr/les-fleuves-les-plus-pollues%20zn%202024 (
3) See (4) https://www.sauvonslaforet.org/themes/barrages/questions-et-reponses
Photo: (source: Pixabay, CC0)
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