Click here to view (at no charge) the 1 1/2 hour film "Home", by French film maker Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It includes footage from 54 countries.

Synopsis

In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it is too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth's riches and change its patterns of consumption.

"If anyone thinks that privatizing BC's rivers is just about 'green power', they are deluding themselves. The ultimate goal: Control the water." - Rex Weyler, Save Our Rivers Board of Advisors

First of all, here's an excellent short video trailer about water, bottled water, corporate control of water, and citizen response. From the producers of "Who killed the electric car": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72MCumz5lq4

My nephew just returned from Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he's been working over the last decade with indigenous groups & campesinos fighting to get their water rights back from Bechtel Corp, part of a massive push to privatize utilities in the third world. Michael's stories of corporate security teams, lawyers, and infiltrators would make your blood boil. Once the globalized corporations own a region's water access, the people have a huge challenge on their hands.

Bechtel had been awarded a 40-year power generation and drinking water contract In Bolivia, and for a while, even attempted to make it illegal to collect rain water. If you don't know about the Cochabamba experience, there is lots on the Internet.

Here is a statement by my nephew, Michael Moss, and Marcela Olivera, a leader of the Bolivian citizens' movement.

Here is a hub of links..
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bolivia/links.html

"Leasing the rain" by William Finnegan, New Yorker

"The world is running out of fresh water, and the fight to control it has begun."

If anyone thinks that privatizing BC's rivers is just about "green power", they are deluding themselves.

The ultimate goal: Control the water.

Fact: Most public policy directed toward so-called sustainability, including alternative energy, is directly or indirectly oriented toward maintaining the status quo by other means—i.e., it emphasizes growth through efficiency or is geared toward increasing supply rather than reducing demand. This (along with kow-towing to the private sector) is what run-of-the-river hydro is all about.

Problem: Governments (and even most ‘environmental’ organizations) have yet to confront a contrary two-fold reality that demands a very different approach:

1. Scientists, particularly climate-change scientists, have grossly  underestimated the scale and rapidity of climate change.  Arctic warming/melting is 80-100 years ahead of the IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario. The most recent peer-reviewed research suggests that the world will be hard-pressed to avoid stabilizing GHGs at less than 650 ppm CO2e which implies a 50% probability of a catastrophic 4C° of warming.
2. Eco-footprint analysis shows that the world is in over-shoot, using 25-40% more of nature’s goods and services each year than the planet can sustainably produce. We are depleting essential natural capital.

Solution: There is nothing for it but to GIVE UP GROWTH. The era of material exuberance in the First World is over. Public policy that does not reflect this reality merely accelerates  ecosystemic—and ultimately societal—collapse.

In this light, the mad scramble by governments everywhere to re-establish ‘normal’ growth after the recent implosion of the world’s greed-driven financial markets is tragicomedy on a global scale. Sustainability requires that we should, instead, be planning a stable way down for everyone while we still have the capacity to do so. Governments should be negotiating a global treaty on ‘contraction and convergence’ by which the First World would shrink its per eco-footprints to converge, at a sustainable level, with justifiably growing per capita EFs in the Third World. We should aim to de-carbonize the global economy completely by 2025. All this implies an 80% reduction in per capita consumption and waste production by North Americans.

The good news is that the implicit serious conservation effort would generate more energy from existing sources than can be derived by supply-side approaches. Ecologically hazardous run-of-the-river hydro is an unnecessary growthist strategy.

By the way, ‘zero growth’ may be blasphemy today, but within a decade or so it will have become holy doctrine.

The inventor of the "eco-footprint" concept, Dr. William Rees is one the world's foremost  ecological and sustainability experts.  He teaches at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning.

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Story by Richard Black on BBC News: Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

Quote from Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukdev: "So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."