QUOTES
"We
know that 5 million people, most of them children, die every year from illnesses
caused by poor drinking water. "If we do not change our ways, by the year 2025,
as much as two-thirds of the world will be living in either water scarcity or
total water deprivation."
What
makes the WTO so powerful and so dangerous is that it has both the legislative
and judicial power to challenge the laws, policies and programs of countries that
do not conform to the lowest common denominator rules set by the WTO and to strike
them down if they're seen as being hostile to unregulated trade.
the
WTO has become the most powerful tool of transnational capital.
At
the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons,
in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that
we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and
seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom -- not
democracy, and not ecological stewardship -- is the defining metaphor of the WTO
and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total
commodification.
The
destruction of aquatic ecosystem health, and the increasing water scarcity, are
in my opinion the most pressing environmental problems facing human kind.
Water
is being depleted many, many times faster than nature can replenish it.
no
piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems
and that a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems
is urgent.
We
are committed with our lives to building a different model and a different future
for humanity, the Earth, and other species. We have envisaged a moral alternative
to economic globalization and we will not rest until we see it realized.
"I
go crazy when I see certain things and I have to find out why they happen. And
I have to tell people. I have to do something so that other people will also take
action."
"Under
the current model of globalization, everything is for sale. Areas once considered
our common heritage are being commodified, commercialized and privatized at an
alarming rate. Today, more than ever before, the targets of this assault comprise
the building blocs of life as we know it on this planet, including freshwater,
the human genome, seeds and plant varieties, the air and atmosphere, the oceans
and outer space. The assault on, and defence of, the commons is one of the great
ideological and social struggles of our times."
-- Maude Barlow and Tony
Clarke
