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Saturday, Apr 26, 2008
12:30 pm
Flow: For Love of Water
Rocket fuel running from our taps. Sex-shifting frogs and fish on Prozac. Rivers of sewage and slaughterhouse blood flowing into sacred lakes. Children dying because their families cannot afford to buy clean water from the multinational corporations that control it. These are among the alarming, all-too-real scenarios arrayed in Flow to demonstrate that the resource whose scarcity most threatens our future isn't oil-it's water. And as Maude Barlow, Canadian water activist and author of Blue Gold, says in the film, the crisis isn't 50 or 100 years down the road: it's happening now. This important documentary joins reports from scientists, researchers, and human rights advocates (several of them from Berkeley) with wide-ranging on-the-ground footage to demonstrate how access to water is inextricably and disastrously linked to the flow of capital. Snapshot case studies from Indian villages, African townships, and communities right here in the United States portray the devastating effects of treating a life-giving natural resource as a commodity to be harvested and sold at a profit. Meanwhile, governments and the World Bank seek to address the problem of scarcity with more privatization and colossal dam projects that may do more environmental, cultural, and economic harm than good. Flow finds currents of hope in successful small-scale local solutions, which often draw on indigenous traditions, and in the activists swimming against an overwhelming tide of political mismanagement and corporate greed.
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