Water: a common good, public management, and alternatives

TNI, Reclaiming Public Water Network, RED vida

This video was produced during this meeting and it carries water activists visionary voices.

From the 23rd to the 25th of August, 2008, water justice activists from across the Americas met in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the same city where some of the first open battles against water privatization were launched and won eight years ago. The gathering, called 'Agua, Bien Común, Gestión Pública y Alternativas,' (Water, a Common Good, Public Management, and Alternatives) brought together more than 60 organizations from 15 countries to envision just and sustainable models of water stewardship and to build alliances that will bring these visions to fruition. Over three days, a diverse group of participants analyzed current trends in the privatization and commercialization of water, and shared experiences in the construction of public and community-controlled water management systems as alternatives to the dominant logic of privatization and commodification of water.

There is also a report that was published after the meeting:

Changing the flow: Water movements in Latin America

Beverly Bell, Jeff Conant, Marcela Olivera, Crossley Pinkstaff, Philipp Terhorst

Global Justice Ecology Project

A Bold Challenge to Modern Capitalism

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

• We must change the very nature of corporations so they become legally accountable to society at large, not just to themselves and their shareholders.


• We must challenge the current obsession with GDP growth and focus on growth in the areas that truly enhance human well-being: growth in good jobs, in the availability of health care, in education, in the deployment of green technologies, in the incomes of the poor, in security against illness and disability, in infrastructure, and more.


• We must challenge materialism and consumerism as the source of happiness and seek new values about quality of life, social solidarity, and connectedness to nature.


• We must transform the market through government action so that it works for the environment, rather than against it.


• We must transform democracy through deep political reforms that reassert popular control, encouraging locally strong, deliberative democracy and limiting corporate influence.


• We must forge a new environmental politics that recognizes links among environmentalism, social liberalism, human and civil rights, the fight against poverty, and other issues.

The Carbon Age: From Crisis to Stability

Eric Roston Duke University, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat

James Gustave Speth Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

Science has never carried greater promise for our lives than it does today. Yet some technologies that power prosperity now show a perilous side. A distinguished science journalist and an environmentalvisionary grapple with these conflicting realities.
Capital Science Lectures

Social Innovation

Definition

Social innovation is an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two. The capacity of any society to create a steady flow of social innovations, particularly those which re-engage vulnerable populations, is an important contributor to the overall social and ecological resilience.

The concept is founded on the following assumptions:

• The need for social innovation is obvious and compelling. The opportunity for social innovation is less obvious, but, equally compelling.


• Social problems are, by nature, complex problems- social innovators work in complex systems.


• Social innovation requires collaborative enterprise; the social sector, public sector and private sector must work together to create transformative change.


• Social innovation requires new forms of knowledge production, combining knowledge from multiple disciplines and from both theory and practice to reframe and solve problems.

Waterloo Applied Complexity and Innovation Seminars

The focus of the WICI Seminar Series is to bring together students and researchers from across the University of Waterloo who are interested in understanding the complex processes that will be central to human well being in the 21st century.

George Francis - World and Other Systems: A Challenge to WICI

Lee Smolin - Symmetries in Economic Models and their Consequences

Matthew Hoffman - Governance Avalanches: A Self-Organized Criticality Perspective on Innovation in Global Governance

Frances Westley - Social Innovation & Resilience: A Complexity Approach to Change and Transformation

Keith Hipel - Trade vs. the Environment: Strategic Settlement from a Systems Engineering Perspective

Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ingenuity Theory: Adaptation Failure and Societal Crisis

Peak Moment Conversations

Peak Moment is a weekly series showcasing perspectives and initiatives for local self-reliant living. Programs feature host Janaia Donaldson's conversations and on-site tours with guests preparing for accelerating energy decline, climate chaos, and economic uncertainty.

Sample topics include: local food production; renewable energy; transportation alternatives; sustainable building; personal, economic, business, and governmental responses.

We are planning a North American taping trip in 2009, and welcome suggestions for new programs.

On Thin Ice

Seventy-five percent of the world's fresh water is stored in glaciers, but scientists predict climate change will cause some of the world's largest glaciers to completely melt by 2030. What effect will this have on our daily lives? With global warming falling low on a national list of American concerns, it's time to take a deeper look at what could be a global calamity in the making.

This week, in a special one-hour NOW on PBS, David Brancaccio and environmentalist Conrad Anker—one of the world's leading high altitude climbers—trek to the Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayan Mountains, the source of the Ganges River, to witness the great melt and its dire consequences first-hand. The two also visit Montana's Glacier National Park to see the striking effects of global warming closer to home and learn how melting glaciers across the globe can have a direct impact on food prices in the U.S.

Along the way, Brancaccio and Anker talk to both scientists and swamis, bathe in the River Ganges, view a water shortage calamity in India, and come as close as any human can to seeing the tangible costs of climate change.

"We can't take climate change and put it on the back burner," warns Anker. "If we don't address climate change, we won't be around as humans."

On Thin Ice: Our Disappearing Glaciers

Simon A. Levin, Moffett Professor of Biology, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

"Learning to Live in a Global Commons: Socioeconomic Challenges for a Sustainable Environment"

• Real Player Video Streaming


• Windows Media Video Streaming

"The Evolution of Ecosystem Patterns"

• Real Player Video Streaming


• Windows Media Video Streaming

Storer Lecture Series