Water

Does anyone own the rivers, the rain, the water in the ground?

Who decides who gets to drink, to water their food crops, to bathe? Who gets to say if the salmon are less important than the factory farm, or the town's aquifer can be pumped and sold in plastic bottles by the people who manage Nestle or Coca Cola, or some other multi-national corporation?

Do the people who are affected by decisions about redirecting water flow for industrial use, or impeding a river to generate electricity have the final say? What about the ecosystem, and the community of life that depends on natural water systems for their continued existence?

Under American law, which protects the rights of property more stringently than human, civil and natural rights, water in its natural state is being transformed on paper into the property of large corporations. It is being privatized, and changed from a vital component of life on earth into a commodity to be taken from human and natural communities and either used for private profit in industrial activities, such as agribusiness, gas drilling, manufacturing processes, or packaged and sold as "value-added" products. A relatively small number of people are using corporations to take water from nature and communities, where it sustains life, and sell it to people, to sustain profits.

As fresh, natural sources of water become scarce, due to toxic degradation by legally permitted corporate activities, and due to its legally sanctioned privatization, people are coming to realize that responsibility for remedying or simply enduring harmful effects brought about by the unintentional and intentional modifications to weather, the introduction of toxins into the environment, and the privatization of water, is borne predominantly by the public and our common environment. State and federal authorities regularly license and sanction water privatization and damaging corporate behavior, while state and federal lawmakers and courts exercise preemptive authority over community attempts to prohibit the legal theft and ruination of natural water systems. Meanwhile, representatives of corporate industry meet to create strategies and policies with which the people affected will have to obey and cope.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is working with people who have decided it's time to change the rules about who makes the rules. Rather than attempting to "regulate" the rate of privatization and destruction of natural water systems, this nascent people's movement for water-rights has begun to exercise local governing authority by enacting new laws that assert this right. They are pushing back against the laws that favor commercial conquest and the enclosure movement of the 21st Century over human, civil and natural rights.

We invite you to join us in this important endeavor!