Is bottled water any good? Is our tap water safe and healthy? Do we need to conserve it? These and many other questions around water are becoming increasingly prevalent through growing efforts around environmental sustainability, and the newly-established Squamish Climate Action Network (CAN) is attempting to invigorate discussion in a two-part film and speaker series over the next two Mondays.
Squamish Can invites locals to Water, the solid facts: A common resource for life?, a presentation that includes the film Blue Gold - World Water Wars on Monday (June 15).
The film is an internationally acclaimed documentary narrated by Malcolm McDowell and based on the best selling book Blue Gold: the Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water.
The film highlights how, in every corner of the globe, mankind is polluting, diverting, pumping, and wasting the limited supply of fresh water at an expediential level as population and technology grows. The rampant overdevelopment of agriculture, housing and industry increase the demands for fresh water well beyond the finite supply, resulting in the desertification of the Earth.
Corporate giants force developing countries to privatize their water supply for profit. Wall Street investors target desalination and mass bulk water export schemes. Corrupt governments use water for economic and political gain. Military control of water emerges and a new geo-political map and power structure forms, setting the stage for world water wars.
Filmmakers Sam Bozzo, Mark Achbar and Si Litvinoff follow numerous worldwide examples of people fighting for their basic right to water, from court cases to violent revolutions to UN conventions to revised constitutions to local protests at grade schools.
"A line is crossed as water becomes a commodity," they state. "Will we survive?"
The event is free and doors open at 6:30 p.m.
