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Make the commitment"We can provide water and clean sanitation for the world's people. We can grow enough food with less water to satisfy growing food demands. We can have a healthy economy and a healthy agricultural sector, and use less water than we're using today. We can solve our water contamination problems. We know how. It's just not clear that we're going to make the commitment." download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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What would we do?"I don't think any of us can really imagine what would happen if tomorrow the water stopped; the water was shut off. Think about what we use water for. we use it not just to drink, but we use it flush our toilets; to get rid of our wastes. We use it for cooking, we use it for cleaning. Not just our bodies, but our homes. Some of us use it to grow a little bit of vegetation in our gardens, sometimes the little vegetables in our garden to eat. If that water shut off, what would we do? We'd look around and we'd say 'Well, are there any local sources, are there local creeks, are there local streams' For those of us who live in cities, sometimes there are local creeks and local streams, but most of them are too heavily contaminated to use, and they wouldn't satisfy the needs that we have. We move water thousands of mile to bring it to our cities, because we've outgrown our local water resources. What would we do if the water shut off tomorrow? I think we'd be hard-pressed to come up with an answer to that." download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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New Solutions"I think one of the ways we're going to make progress in solving our water problems is not to apply the old solutions over and over again, but to find the water stories that are successes, to find the innovative things that small communities may be doing, and to learn what those stories are and to explore why they're successes, and then retell those stories in ways that other communities can understand, that other policy makers can say 'Oh, there is another way of doing this. There are alternative answers to these problems, and the solutions that I've been applying over and over again that have been failing, I don't have to do the same thing. I don't have to do the same wrong thing over and over again'. And so, stories teach people. Stories are the way we learn from our mistakes, and the way we learn from our successes. And I think the extent to which a project like Circle of Blue can capture those stories and tell those stories is the way that we're going to find the new answers." download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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Telling stories"Ultimately, numbers don't tell the story as well as pictures do, as well as stories do. And I think one of the challenges for water experts, or for policy makers, is in fact not to tell the story in numbers but to convert the numbers into things people really care about. to figure out a way to make 1.1 billion people without safe water something that means something more clearly to people, that people really care about, that in fact is not a number like 1.1 billion, but is a family that has a sick child. Or a girl who can't go to school because she has to spend three or four hours a day walking miles to collect water that may not even be safe enough to drink. So ultimately it's not about the numbers, it's about the human aspects of water that are going to really convince people to take action, that are going top really convince policy makers to move forward." download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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Rethink our whole civilization"If our municipal water supply shut off, we couldn't survive on the local water resources that we have. The cities depend on water from outside of our local communities. They depend on our bringing water enormous distances and treating that water to a very high standard so that we can use it. And if that water stopped, we'd have to rethink our whole civilization." download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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What happens in the third world affects the first"I've been looking at water issues for about 4 years now -- on and off every time I got sent to a place connected to water, I tended to take a day or two, or if I was lucky a week and look to see what was going on with that. The reason I got out to looking at water issues in the first place was because I was covering conflict, mostly African conflict at the time, and I noticed that there were far more deaths coming out of a basic lack of resources; things that you and I would take for granted download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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Water & Immigration"I was also struck by how the phenomenon of immigration from Mexico to the United States is really a national phenomenon in Mexico. It is not limited to those border states that lie near the American Southwest or to those states that have been associated with immigration, more populous states in the center of the country like Guanajuato. In fact, immigration is very much an active phenomenon in places like the Tehuacán valley that you don't normally associate with immigration. But because of the chronic shortages of water and the lack of any other employment possibilities in the Mexican hinterland, these areas are also sources of undocumented workers that are only going to grow in coming years. And that should give pause to US policy makers grappling with the immigration issue and trying to come up with ways to halt that flow. –Joe Contreras download .mp3 | request HD/SD Video file
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