The Struggle For Clean Water

"The report, 'Make It Safe: Canada's Obligation to End the First Nations Water Crisis,' documents the impacts of serious and prolonged drinking water and sanitation problems for thousands of indigenous people--known as "First Nations"--living on reserves. It assesses why there are problems with safe water and sanitation on reserves, including a lack of binding water quality regulations, erratic and insufficient funding, faulty or sub-standard infrastructure, and degraded source waters. The federal government's own audits over two decades show a pattern of overpromising and underperforming on water and sanitation for reserves"--Publisher's description.

From the environmental activist, consumer advocate, and renowned crusader comes a riveting book that is "part memoir, part non-fiction report, and part call-to-action—a plea to readers to engage with the water crisis in America because no one else is going to do the work for you" (InStyle Magazine). Clean water is as basic to life on planet Earth as hydrogen or oxygen. In her long-awaited book—her first to reckon with the condition of water on our planet—Erin Brockovich shows us what’s at stake. She writes powerfully of the fraudulent science disguising our national water crisis: Cancer clusters are not being reported. People in Detroit and the state of New Jersey don’t have clean water. The drinking water for more than six million Americans contains unsafe levels of industrial chemicals linked to cancer and other health issues. The saga of PG&E continues to this day. Yet communities and people around the country are fighting to make an impact, and Brockovich tells us their stories. In Poughkeepsie, New York, a water operator responded to his customers’ concerns and changed his system to create some of the safest water in the country. Local moms in Hannibal, Missouri, became the first citizens in the nation to file an ordinance prohibiting the use of ammonia in their public drinking water. Like them, we can each protect our right to clean water by fighting for better enforcement of laws, new legislation, and stronger regulations.

Set in Appalachian coal country, this “superb” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) legal drama follows one determined lawyer as he faces a coal industry giant in a seven-year battle over clean drinking water for a West Virginia community. For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems—from kidney stones to cancer—in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so. For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. While Massey’s lawyers worked out of a gray glass office tower in Charleston known as “the Death Star,” Thompson set up shop in a ramshackle hotel in the fading coal town of Williamson. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would eventually uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk. Retired coal miners, women whose families had lived in the area’s coal camps for generations, a respected preacher and his brother, all put their trust in Thompson when they had nowhere else to turn. Desperate is a masterful work of investigative reporting about greed and denial, “both a case study in exploitation of the little guy and a playbook for confronting it” (Kirkus Reviews). Maher crafts a revealing portrait of a town besieged by hardship and heartbreak, and an inspiring account of one tenacious environmental lawyer’s mission to expose the truth and demand justice.

There are sections on drinking water and a concluding chapter entitled "Getting Personal about Clean Water" about citizen involvement at home and in the community."--BOOK JACKET.

The little-known story of the systems that bring us our drinking water, how they were developed, the problems they are facing, and how they will be reinvented in the near future

Today, 785 million people are living without access to safe water. Water-related illnesses are responsible for almost 1 million deaths each year. Clean water should be a basic human right, but far too few people have access to it. With this informative book, readers will study the global water crisis, how it reached its current state, and its impact on the environment and human lives. Real-life examples of the steps being taken to save Earth's water resources and improve the quality and availability of drinking water will inspire budding environmentalists to take action.

The right to clean water has been adopted by the United Nations as a basic human right. Yet how such universal calls for a right to water are understood, negotiated, experienced and struggled over remain key challenges. The Right to Water elucidates how universal calls for rights articulate with local historical geographical contexts, governance, politics and social struggles, thereby highlighting the challenges and the possibilities that exist. Bringing together a unique range of academics, policy-makers and activists, the book analyzes how struggles for the right to water have attempted to translate moral arguments over access to safe water into workable claims. This book is an intervention at a crucial moment into the shape and future direction of struggles for the right to water in a range of political, geographic and socio-economics contexts, seeking to be pro-active in defining what this struggle could mean and how it might be taken forward in a far broader transformative politics. The Right to Water engages with a range of approaches that focus on philosophical, legal and governance perspectives before seeking to apply these more abstract arguments to an array of concrete struggles and case studies. In so doing, the book builds on empirical examples from Africa, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and the European Union.