Everyone who cares about health, the environment, or the purity of their drinking water ought to watch an informative documentary video named “FLOW, For Love of Water.” You can watch the trailer on this page.
Is water a commodity? Does water get bought and sold on the open market subject to market forces? Does it go on sale? Does the price go up when there’s a natural disaster?
Or is water more like air, available to everyone as a free-flowing natural resource?
The film explores how man-made drugs and other pollutants have made their ways into rivers, oceans, and aquifers, and are causing mutations of aquatic life. It tells how corporations have utilized concerns over polluted ground water to make water sold in a bottle with a scenic image seem healthy and clean – when in fact it is not. There are no regulations governing bottled water and tests show most of it is less pure than city water.
The film also shows how the poor in third world countries have had trouble getting clean water simply because they cannot afford it. World Bank monies go to improve a country’s water resources, but the results are predictable: the rich get the clean water, the poor are left with what’s flowing in the river.
What’s in the process of happening here in Rockledge? The City is using the aquifer below our feet as a filter for excess reclaimed water from its sewage treatment plant, pumping it down and hoping to be able to pump it back out again. But the aquifer flows, leaving us wondering how much will remain near the well and how much will have flowed “downstream” in the layers of the aquifer. Because this “reclaimed” water is not truly drinkable, the City had to implement a potable well ban for any land owners within one mile of the ASR well. This ban came in the form of an Ordinance which no one knew about until some people heard about the ASR project and started investigating. The City thinks it owns all of the water beneath our feet – how did it come to think that?
Nonetheless, it intends to inject non-drinkable, reclaimed water into an aquifer where many wells have existed for many years. Most people may not regularly drink from these wells because of salt-water intrusion, making the water somewhat salty, but it is still healthy to drink. So where did the City get the idea IT owned it all and could take away our rights to this water for the claimed advantage of reducing the use of City of Cocoa water? Why intentionally pollute MY water so it is no longer an option?
The film makes a contrast between the private interests of the people in clean water for health and drinking, and the corporate interests in water for profit. This intrusion into our water rights may not be as big or obvious as what happened in third-world countries, but FLOW makes one think about our relationship to the land and, in contrast, to corporate interests. I find the City’s attempted property rights grab offensive and I hope many of you reading this invest enough time in researching the issue to come to a similar conclusion.
FLOW is available for rental from BlockBuster and NetFlix, among other sources.
EDIT: FLOW can be viewed for free here (broadband required).