Blog Posts

By Kate Fried

Image courtesy of 2012 Erie Rising (www.erierising.com)

While many of us shower our moms with flowers, cards and special outings on Mothers Day, a group of women in Erie, Colorado has a much more urgent request: that the oil and gas giant Encana call off its plans to frack next to their kids’ schools. Encana intends to frack just a stone’s throw from several local schools as early as May 26.

Fearful of potential health problems associated with fracking, the moms of Erie Rising recently wrote a letter to Encana pleading with the company to help safeguard their childrens’ safety by not fracking within 600 yards of their schools. The fact that anyone would have the audacity to forge ahead with such a plan is almost unthinkable, but given the oil and gas industry’s recent attempts to frack near vital drinking water sources, daycare centers and hospitals, this reality is sadly unsurprising.

Food & Water Watch is working with the courageous moms of Erie to hault Encana’s dastardly plan in its tracks. As we stand with the moms of Erie Rising, we hope you will read their letter to Encana, featured below. Help stop the well in Erie by speaking out today. After that, be sure to visit our Fracking Action Center for information on more ways to get involved. Read the full article…

By Rich Bindell

The City of Las Cruces is trying to recoup close to nearly $2 million in unpaid tickets for running red lights. But while times of economic turmoil call for desperate measures, their punishment doesn’t fit the crime. A loophole in a city ordinance would allow the City of Las Cruces to shut off utilities, including water and sewage services, for residents with unpaid red light tickets. Food & Water Watch organizers are currently working with local allies to convince Las Cruces City Council to put an end to this policy. We’re serving notice to the City Council that they’re violating the human right to water.

And Las Cruces isn’t the only city with this problem. With budget shortfalls threatening funding for public services in cities throughout the country, some leaders have incorporated desperate tactics to try to right their ships. Unfortunately, some of these tactics come not only in the form of household water shut-offs for traffic violations, but also threats of jail time for those who can’t afford sanitation systems, and even anti-immigration policies that deny access to water.

Since the United Nations officially recognized water as a human right in July 2010, it’s time for the United States to start working toward making that declaration a reality. Food & Water Watch’s new report, Our Right to Water (a collaboration with the Council of Canadians), demonstrates that we can’t take our relationship with water for granted. Learn more about the report here.

Live in Las Cruces? Act now and sign this petition telling this City Council to stop water shut offs for unpaid traffic tickets: http://action.foodandwaterwatch.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=10375

If you don’t live in Las Cruces but are a New Mexico resident, take action here by telling the New Mexico Attorney General to instruct city officials to stop enforcing this dangerous policy: http://action.foodandwaterwatch.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=10408

By Kate Fried

An intriguing revelation has emerged recently that further illustrates the vast web of hype surrounding the oil and gas industry’s fracking agenda. While the industry has sworn up and down that fracking doesn’t endanger drinking water resources, and while we of course know better, important new research published by an independent hydrogeologist adds credence to the mounting body of evidence that pokes holes in the industry’s already flimsy claims.

The research uses mathematical modeling to contradict the oil and gas industry talking point that fracking can’t endanger water supplies because there are impermeable layers of rock between any water supply and the rock being fracked. The modeling shows that contaminants could reach aquifers within a decade after fracking by traveling through a network of different pathways, pushed along by ordinary pressure forces. The different pathways include wells with failed well casings, new fractures created during fracking and existing natural fractures and faults. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter 

The Take Back the Tap Curriculum is designed to teach kids about the importance of protecting our most essential public resource: water.

Joe Camel. Ronald McDonald. Tony the Tiger. Spuds McKenzie. Kid-friendly advertising tricks by corporations seeking to lure young consumers clutter the annals of marketing history.

While some of these efforts are more insidious than others, they share a common trait. In each case, advertisers were trying to hook new consumers early to cultivate a sense of brand loyalty to be exploited for years to come. With the advent of programs ostensibly designed to teach kids about water issues, bottled water companies are getting in on the action. Their tactics flow through an institution that few kids can escape — the classroom.

The best example of this is Project WET. This non-profit organization claims to educate children and parents about the importance of preserving global water resources. According to its website, “sustainable water management is crucial to secure social and economic stability, as well as a healthy environment.”

That’s certainly true. But Nestlé Waters North America, the organization’s main sponsor, is the last entity that should be empowered to educate the public about responsible water use. When you consider the bottled water behemoth ‘s track record of hogging global water supplies and profiting from them, Project WET’s supposed mission is a slap in the face to any community that has had its water muscled away by Nestlé. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter 

Image By: Maryland Office of the Governor, Maryland State Archives (flickr.com/MDGOVPICS)

*Updated May 9

During the 2012 Maryland legislative session, the burning of pollutant-laden chicken poop was embraced as a Tier I renewable energy resource, while readily available, clean wind power was dead. In Maryland, chicken is truly king. Or, as a series of emails obtained from Martin O’Malley’s office to a Perdue official indicate, it’s at least Governor. 

Food & Water Watch obtained the emails through a Public Information Act request for all correspondence between the Governor’s office and the giant Eastern Shore poultry company. 

In one back-and-forth between O’Malley and the Perdue representative from March 2011, the Governor acknowledges that wind energy may cost the poultry industry “18 cents to $2 additional per month at the outset,” but suggests that the cost is well worth it because “kids keep dying in the middle east.”

Eighteen cents a month to keep kids from dying in the Middle East was, apparently, a price too high to pay for the industry; Perdue responded by complaining of the additional costs to the integrators and stating that wind “is not high on [its] list of concerns.” Perdue, however, did buy into the chicken manure-to-energy scheme as a way to offload some of its mountains of waste in the state. And thanks to companies like Perdue, today in Maryland chicken crap is renewable, and wind is not. 

The 70 pages of emails we obtained were almost exclusively between O’Malley and Perdue’s General Counsel, Herb Frerichs. Mr. Frerichs is also a partner at the law firm that represents Perdue in the Clean Water Act suit bought by environmentalists for pollution coming from one of the company’s contract growers’ facilities. The emails depict a very close and personal relationship between the Governor and Frerichs, who were classmates at the Maryland School of Law in the mid-to-late 1980s. Read the full article…

By Walker Foley

The artwork for Last Call at the Oasis

Drought, famine, disease and war – are these the buzz words of our nightmares, distanced from public perception by vast oceans and foreign lands? Or are they the social products of the rapidly dwindling resource vital to life on Earth?

In many areas of the U.S., the concept of water shortages may seem as foreign as excavating icebergs for potable product. Turn on your tap after all, and the water gods will make it rain. But for those not so blessed, shrinking water supplies in the American Southwest and elsewhere on the globe serve a painful lesson: the tap is running dry.

Jessica Yu’s new film, Last Call at the Oasis, sounds the alarm on dwindling global water resources, and invites Americans to bridge the distance between them and their water.

Through the opening credits water waltzes seductively, teasing the audience with a glittering, circus-spectacle. The circus must end though, and the film must tell its dark tale.

When the Lights Go Out

“Water,” Erin Brockovich begins, “is everything. The single most necessary element for any of us to sustain, and live, and thrive is water.” Speaking of water’s importance, Brockovich draws from her father’s wisdom who warned her, “… in my lifetime that we would see water become more valuable than oil, he said, because there will be so little of it.”

There’s nothing fanciful about the predictions of Brockovich’s childhood memories – the evidence is everywhere. Last Call at the Oasis begins by examining the consequences for the Southwest as climate change, water mismanagement and population growth threaten the long-term viability of the entire region. Having over-tapped the Colorado River, farms are unable to get water for irrigation, while cities struggle to find an electrical alternative to the failing Hoover Dam. Despite the slowdown in agriculture and energy, development (and population) escalates. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

Through coordinated actions this weekend, activists will be Connecting the Dots between climate change and the severe weather, droughts and sea level rise that communities are already experiencing. A project of 350.org, led by climate activist Bill McKibben, the May 5 Day of Action will be happening mere weeks before the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20— where global leaders will meet to make commitments towards carbon reductions 20 years after the UN’s first Conference on Sustainable Development. They will also use the opportunity of the multilateral forum to map out the so-called “green economy”.

That’s where 6/5/12 comes in.

There is an urgent need for communities around the world to send a message to their elected officials participating in Rio+20: We want a truly green economy, not a greenwashed economy. We want an economy that supports communities, not multinational corporations. And we want an economy that upholds our common resources like water as a public trust, not a commodity, and recognizes the human right to water. Read the full article…

Governor Cuomo: Look at these petitions to ban fracking.

For months now, the movement to protect public health and clean drinking water for millions of New Yorkers by banning the destructive, polluting practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the state has been steadily percolating. Organizations have been educating, activists have been organizing and coalitions—like New Yorkers Against Fracking—have been formed. All the while, thousands of concerned citizens across the Empire State have been adding their voices to the swelling tally of those who recognize the terrible danger fracking could bring to New York.

Today those voices were counted, boxed and delivered. This afternoon more than 200,000 fracking ban petitions from New Yorkers far and wide were delivered to Governor Anderew Cuomo’s office by Food & Water Watch and the dozens of partner organizations comprising New Yorkers Against Fracking. The boxes of petitions, stacked one on top of another, rose far higher than any man or woman inside the Capital.

“Today we’re delivering a loud and clear message to Governor Cuomo: New Yorkers want him to stand up to the oil and gas industry and ban fracking,” said Eric Weltman, a Senior Organizer for Food & Water Watch. He went on to sum it up: “Fracking is inherently dangerous, and beyond our capacity to regulate. In the final analysis, there are safer alternatives to natural gas, but there are no alternatives to water.”

The petition delivery comes as over 100 New York municipalities have banned or placed moratoria on fracking, another strong signal of the growing support for a statewide ban. The battle for New York continues.

Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter

It used to be that unscrupulous salesmen would try to sell you the bridge; nowadays, they’ve climbed a rung lower – they’re trying to sell you the public trust water flowing under the bridge. A recent website, thebaybank.org, has planted a giant “For Sale” sign on the Chesapeake Bay and the stage is now set to create a marketplace out of this sacred common resource, with the Bay being sold off credit-by-credit.

So what exactly do you get when you buy a credit on Baybank’s website? You don’t actually get a cup of Bay water. The water bottling companies have already figured out how to commoditize our water resources by pouring it into containers and selling it in the supermarkets. Baybank actually promotes a much more insidious way to market our waterways – they’re facilitating the sale of the right to pollute the Bay with more of the same contaminants that are already threatening the very future of this important watershed.

Here how water pollution trading—also known as water quality trading—is supposed to work: instead of recognizing that waterways are owned by everyone as a public trust and enforcing the prohibition on polluting our water, these market-based approaches allow some polluters to claim they’ve decreased their pollution and then sell that alleged decrease, in the form of pollution credits, to other polluters who want to increase their pollution. Read the full article…

By Wenonah Hauter

The Wall Street Journal reports that China is importing 100,000 heifers — 25 ships’ worth — to boost domestic dairy production in the wake of melamine and other milk-powder scandals that have decimated China’s relatively small dairy industry since 2008.

Where to begin? There are so many problems with this scenario, but here are just five reasons why this is a terribly bad idea:

1) The cows are destined for factory farms. China may be importing the cattle from Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand, but they are importing the model for factory farming from the U.S. The animals’ long nightmare starts on a harrowing journey overseas in ships, where they are confined tightly and face multiple health issues that may result in death. Those buried at sea might be the luckiest cattle, because once the animals get through the 45-day quarantine, they will continue their confinement in “football-field-size sheds” that resemble electronics factories more than farms and are milked three times a day on “bovine merry-go-rounds,” according to Wall Street Journal reporter Alex Frangos. Read the full article…