THE BREN SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

in association with

Food & Water Watch

and

California Water Impact Network

Presents

"The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water"

Speaker Statement

Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker, and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert.

Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities who will sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remote parts of the world left or sucked from the clouds by machines, while the poor die in increasing numbers. This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course.

Biography

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and the founder of the Blue Planet Project, working internationally for the right to water. She serves on the boards of the International Forum on Globalization and Food and Water Watch and is a Councillor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council. Maude is the recipient of six honorary doctorates, the 2005/2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award, and the 2005 Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”) for her global water justice work. She is also the best-selling author or co-author of 16 books, including Blue Gold, The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water and the recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

To join the "bren-alerts" mailing list and receive regular announcements about Bren School news and events, or to manage your bren-alerts account, go to http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/services/computing/bren-alerts.htm

To see a complete list of currently scheduled Bren events, visit http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/news/all_events.htm

To have an event considered for distribution via bren-alerts, send e-mail to media@bren.ucsb.edu

For more information or for assistance in accommodating a disability, please contact BJ Danetra

To find out how to support the Bren School, please contact Jennifer Purcell Deacon