00:00:17.500To make a donation, visit forthewild.world slash donate, or find us on Patreon.
00:00:23.240If you'd like to support us in other ways, consider sharing our episodes through social media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to the podcast.
00:00:34.620Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Andrea Baggestero.
00:00:42.340In an era of climate change, I'm convinced that the starting point needs to be a different one.
00:00:49.840Not the question of pricing, but the question of collectivity and justice for humans and not humans.
00:00:56.720Andrea Bajdrestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University,
00:01:02.020and she is also the founder and director of the Ethnography Studio.
00:01:06.060Her background includes a law degree, training in natural resource policy, and a PhD in anthropology.
00:01:12.340She has more than 15 years of experience researching how societies define, distribute, and value water.
00:01:19.420Her recent book, A Future History of Water, examines the daily work of implementing the human right to water in Costa Rica and in Northeast Brazil.
00:01:29.100This book is open access and available for download for free on her website.
00:01:35.420Well, Angea, thank you so much for being with us today.
00:01:40.340I'm really looking forward to talking with you.
00:01:43.580I respect your work and your knowledge so much.
00:02:00.360And so I want to start by saying that you highlight the power and ubiquity of water.
00:02:06.580And in the anthropology of water, you chart its pervasiveness, how it's responsible for everyday objects like blue jeans and bread and coffee, it's essential for fracking, defined through watersheds, and also exists as a healing modality.
00:02:22.600Yet most of us take water for granted as a mundane necessity, not recognizing how tightly woven it is in religion, politics, science, and the economy.
00:02:32.860So to ground listeners in this conversation, I wonder if you can share what is fundamental for us to understand about water at this moment in time.
00:02:41.800Thank you. I like to think of this question of the foundations or the fundamental nature of water by thinking directly and embracing its changing form.
00:02:57.200In other words, that which is fundamental about water is not a single baseline or not one thing that is sitting there as a kernel, but instead it's this capacity and the properties by which it is constantly changing form.
00:03:15.220it is conveying the possibility of multiple relations and consequently also changing meaning
00:03:24.900or having multiple meanings at once so you we know that for instance water can be part of your kin
00:03:30.460it could be a being that you take care of as you take as you care for your grandmother or your
00:03:36.740grandfather your aunt it's of course crucial for all forms of life for the fundamental
00:03:44.100biological processes of life. But at the same time, it challenges so many of the ideas that
00:03:53.600we take for granted as oppositions or contradictions. So for instance, water helps us
00:04:00.240think about what is natural, but it also helps us think about what is human-made. We use water
00:04:08.260to identify the natural environment so for instance when you think about a river when you
00:04:14.800think about a lake the ocean but at the same time when you see a fountain and when you see a pipe
00:04:21.060it helps you understand what is the built environment and furthermore water challenges
00:04:28.260in very interesting ways the ways in which the border between what is live and what is inert
00:04:34.640is set so if one asks is water alive we almost have a hard time answering this question because
00:04:45.160we want to say of course it is but yes it is not if you think in a very narrow kind of way
00:04:51.320so what is fundamental for what about water for me it's this constant changing meaning and form
00:04:59.720And I think that that constant change also reveals some of the fundamental contradictions and injustices of contemporary life.
00:05:11.480So you can think of water as something that now is being traded in the stock market.
00:05:17.060At the same time, that water is something that millions and millions of people around the world lack for their everyday needs.
00:05:25.540so it it can make your everyday life less difficult when you use water to shower to brush
00:05:32.280your teeth when you can do that by just opening a faucet but at the same time it can push humans
00:05:39.260to the limits of dignity and well-being when you don't have that everyday availability water can
00:05:45.600be scarce but it can also overwhelm us with its magnificent volume when you're experiencing floods
00:05:52.200or when you're connecting with the ocean for instance and so as something that connects us
00:06:00.460with multiple forms of life and with different types of being really water helps us understand
00:06:07.940or helps us make sense about what what life is and at this moment in human history it's doing so
00:06:16.580even by posing questions about the planetary and the extraplanetary.
00:06:22.160So if you think about how important it was for scientists to identify traces of water in Mars
00:06:29.080to understand what life is, both here on planet Earth and beyond.
00:06:35.700So it's that magnificent capacity to exist in multiple forms and in changing forms.
00:06:42.340and with those changing uses and changing meanings and that I think is the fundamental
00:06:50.680thing that we need to come to terms with in order to face the conditions of life in our planet at
00:06:59.800the present moment and I should say I should clarify here that this is something that this
00:07:07.180fundamental property is something that many people in the world are aware of, but other people are
00:07:16.140not. And what I mean to say about this is that when you live in a capitalist society, and when
00:07:21.360you're an urban being, sometimes you might forget about these things. But there are groups of people
00:07:26.680around the world that have not forgotten, or that are very aware and organize their daily lives in
00:07:33.520connection with this idea of changing form, changing uses, and changing meanings.
00:07:41.280Wow, Andrea, that was such a beautiful introduction. Thank you for your words and
00:07:48.640your thought and your soul behind these huge topics. And I'll just say that I have such an
00:07:57.940appreciation for water much more than I did when I was younger. And partially because when I moved
00:08:04.460out to Cougar Mountain, I had no running water or electricity for two years. And the type of
00:08:12.960just physical endurance of moving water by oneself is an enormous task. And when I finally
00:08:23.080piped water to a sink that I could actually turn on the faucet it was it was like a miracle moment
00:08:31.080and it really made me take a step back and just realize how much infrastructure has to happen in
00:08:40.560order for us to turn on water for those of us who do have it in our houses or our offices or wherever
00:08:46.600it happens to come out that's convenient for us it's actually a huge project to get that water
00:08:52.520directly to us and how grateful that we all should really be to have access to clean water
00:08:59.440directly to us for those of us who do. So thank you so much for speaking to those different facets.
00:09:06.220Now, in 2010, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the right to safe
00:09:14.260and clean water for drinking and sanitation as a human right. Yet, I believe over 2 billion people
00:09:21.300still lack access to clean water, and conversations on water privatization remain salient.
00:09:28.480Your book, A Future History of Water, explores the tension and intricacies that exist in between
00:09:34.620a human right and a commodity. So before we delve into water futures, regulation, and pricing,
00:09:42.520I'm wondering if you can explain how human rights and commodities are given definition
00:09:48.440through regulatory and governing bodies yes and this connects really nicely to your
00:09:55.800your previous comment in terms of the huge effort and the huge amount of energy that
00:10:02.200is required to bring water to move water and to put it in particular places
00:10:08.260so that some humans have access to it or some ecosystems can can keep the water in their space
00:10:17.560and one thing that I am really interested in is that everyday work and so when I approach
00:10:26.100the question of what does it mean to say that water is a human right or water is a commodity
00:10:31.540I approach it not necessarily from an abstract philosophical point of view but as an
00:10:39.620anthropologist by looking at the things that people are doing on the ground to give concrete
00:10:46.320meaning to those two ideas so taking that into consideration what i'm going to talk about
00:10:52.960now are are those ways in which through everyday actions and in everyday work people are making
00:11:00.480concrete these somewhat abstract notion of a human right and a commodity so let's begin with with a
00:11:07.920commodity. So to say that water is a commodity, in reality, is to diagnose a continuum, a series
00:11:16.840of institutional rules and ways of approaching water that we see all around us when we live in
00:11:23.120capitalist economic systems. So in a very broad sense, we could say, for instance, that paying for
00:11:31.240water as a service, that is the bill that you get at the end of the month, whether you get the bill
00:11:36.840yourself or whether that is included in your rent that is one form of commodification
00:11:43.420why because we are exchanging the service the water service in this case using economic means
00:11:51.280money either well fewer people these days i use physical money but it may be through your credit
00:11:57.440card or even some people through bitcoin but that's one in a very broad sense what
00:12:03.860the commodification of water entails, exchanging it using economic means. But in a more precise
00:12:13.560sense, to think about the commodification of water is, yes, to think about its exchange
00:12:20.580through the use of money, as in the example I gave, but furthermore, to understand that such
00:12:28.520exchange needs to happen according to market ideologies of supply and demand. That is according
00:12:35.580to the idea that if you let market forces of supply and demand, you will reach prices that
00:12:45.060are appropriate in one way or another. And in economic theory, there are tons of concepts that
00:12:52.760help explain the caveats that one should take to this notion of supply and demand but in general
00:13:01.680this idea of marketization this idea that supply and demand will help allocate resources in an
00:13:11.140appropriate or efficient would be the technical way is behind a more precise sense of what the
00:13:18.860commodification of water means. And this has implications for whether water can be traded
00:13:26.560in the financial market or not, whether you can have a water right that you can sell or not,
00:13:33.960whether you can stop paying your utility and keep getting a water service at home or not.
00:13:41.820So there's all sorts of practical implications to this idea.
00:13:46.480So that is one model, to put it in explanatory terms, although, as we might discuss a little
00:13:53.800bit later, and as I show in the book, this dichotomy is a little bit more, it's a little
00:14:06.080Now, on the other hand, you have the idea of water as a human right.
00:14:10.420When you think about it in those terms, then you're introducing another set of considerations into how we value, allocate, and distribute water.
00:14:20.760So it's not only supply and demand or economic instruments, but it's other things that also come to matter.
00:14:27.320So in terms of principle, you could say that by saying that water is a human right, you are recognizing that it is a fundamental entitlement, something that is crucial for the maintenance of human life.
00:14:41.800And for that reason, cannot be organized only following ideologies of market supply and demand or ideologies of profit or ideologies of endless growth.
00:14:52.560In 2010, as you said, the UN passed the resolution recognizing water access and sanitation as human rights.
00:15:02.340Unfortunately, the United States abstained in that vote, claiming procedural and technical issues,
00:15:11.140as the US often does in the international relations space,
00:15:17.000where they use these ideas of these technicalities to justify why they're not going to go with
00:15:23.040resolutions that are broadly accepted globally. So in this case, in 2010, the U.S. was accompanied
00:15:31.260by 40 other countries that abstained, but 122 countries around the world recognized,
00:15:37.940passed the resolution, recognizing water as a human right. And in the definition that they
00:15:44.840accepted, they identify five characteristics that have come to guide what we understand
00:15:53.540is the implication of this recognition. The text says that in order to be a human right,
00:16:00.940water access needs to be sufficient. It needs to be safe. It needs to be acceptable,
00:16:08.100both in biological and cultural terms. It needs to be physically accessible, which goes to your
00:16:14.740point about how close or far water sources are from your home. And most importantly, it needs to
00:16:20.940be affordable. I shouldn't say most importantly. I think that came out because I focus on that
00:16:27.200in part of my book. But the fifth point is it's affordability. And why is the affordability
00:16:33.880so interesting here? Because in it, we find this tension between the idea of a human right
00:16:41.660and a commodity. In a certain way, when you say that water is affordable, or it needs to be
00:16:47.720affordable, you're embracing the idea that you're going to exchange it. And for the most part,
00:16:54.620this was going to happen using some medium of exchange money, usually. And so when you say
00:17:01.080that a human right is affordable, you begin to see the implications of the idea or the two models,
00:17:09.080the human right and the commodity models, and the difficulty of keeping them completely separate from each other.
00:17:39.080A little deeper I've come to meet you. Waterkeeper, let us breed her.1.00
00:17:45.580A little deeper I've come to meet you. Waterkeeper, let us breed her.0.93
00:17:52.180Sing me pal Themil Magal Santa Huita, Santa iteration
00:17:59.840A little deeper, I'll come to the church.
00:18:29.820formula calculating a financial humanitarian price for water, you write, quote, in the case
00:18:36.820of water, especially given its status as a human right, citizens and many regulators tend to be
00:18:43.440suspicious of what market pricing can accomplish. But this mistrust is not a rejection of prices in
00:18:50.900general. In Costa Rica, people readily accept that they should pay for water. What they are
00:18:56.700suspicious of are prices produced by markets, because at least as they relate to water,
00:19:02.780markets usually conceal intentions to extract as much profit as possible, end quote.
00:19:08.960And I think for many, if we view water as a human right, then it should be free. And for others who
00:19:16.820are leaning towards an understanding of water, land, and soil, not as a resource, but as a
00:19:22.260relative, this is also somewhat counterintuitive. So should water be free? And if not, why?
00:19:31.600That's an excellent question. And your two examples remind us of what I was saying at the
00:19:38.820beginning about the multiplicity and changing relations that different communities have with
00:19:45.560with water. So I think that one important distinction here is whether we're talking
00:19:55.500about pricing water per se versus talking about the ways in which we can pay or make water reach
00:20:06.340people and communities in different places. I remember very clearly when I was doing field
00:20:13.620work I was at a community meeting and there was a conversation where people were having
00:20:20.860different points of view between two uh a lady and a gentleman both of which were part of the
00:20:29.040community aqueduct association in that particular area of Costa Rica and she was telling him uh
00:20:37.220yes and this this i'm paraphrasing here but these were basically her words yes god and nature gave
00:20:45.400us water but it is too bad that they don't they didn't put it on your doorstep and what she was
00:20:52.200referring here was that them as a community organization when they were uh facing this
00:21:02.440obligation to make sure that the households in their small rural community all had water that
00:21:12.140reached at least the entrance of their property, if not all the way into their houses. That work
00:21:20.840has a cost because you have to, and here we return to the question of the practicalities
00:21:28.180of everyday life you have to buy pipes you have to uh somebody has to have the time the labor and
00:21:36.460the energy to dig in the ground to put the pipes in somebody has to have the knowledge
00:21:44.140about how to make two pipes of different sizes connect with each other and those those are also
00:21:53.540questions of labor right and so in communities where somebody would have to not go to work in
00:22:01.840the fields attending to their plot but would have to spend two weeks helping install these pipes
00:22:12.240there's a question of labor that was important to be recognized from their point of view0.55
00:22:16.900and so what what this woman this lady was uh conveying is like of course there's a way in0.97
00:22:25.840which if this is a collective infrastructure there are costs of buying chlorine and keeping
00:22:33.520the pump going that need to be covered in one way or another how is it that we're going to do this
00:22:40.120In Costa Rica, this is done in two ways. On the one hand, there is the largest public utility, publicly owned, meaning owned by the state, not publicly traded, which collects money to make big investments into infrastructures.
00:22:58.780And once these infrastructures are put in place, they often pass on the management of the aqueduct to these community organizations, where they are responsible for running the system in the everyday.
00:23:14.420They employ one person in their community, or more than one, depending on the size of the community.
00:23:21.100And these are the bodies that are in charge of the everyday activities.
00:23:25.920so if you ask the people that are part of the systems they don't they think it's okay to pay
00:23:36.180for water even though what they mean is to pay for the service of water provision now
00:23:43.960like you nicely pointed this is not necessarily the same point of view that other communities
00:23:51.480might have. And so what is crucial, I believe, here is to understand the fundamental idea that
00:24:00.100water is always a collective concern and not an individual good. And so how that collective
00:24:07.560decides to embrace the very practical question about how is it that we're going to move this
00:24:18.000sweater, that is the key for me. Asking how is it in that collective understandings, how is it that
00:24:28.260questions of justice are brought to bear? If we presume that justice is an intrinsic question for
00:24:38.900any collectivity. Now, I'm giving you an example, a small scale example, about how the question of
00:24:47.500whether water should be free or not can be addressed.
00:24:51.760If we scale up a little bit and we think about large providers in large urban spaces, for
00:24:59.700instance, in the case of Costa Rica, that would be, there's just one municipal utility
00:25:06.780that tends to one area in the Central Valley.
00:25:11.160And then in the rest of the country, there's just another publicly owned, owned by the
00:25:16.940central government utility that provides water for the rest of the big urban spaces in their case
00:25:24.740when you ask them what do you mean by saying that water should be a human right their answer is
00:25:33.020different they evidently don't think that water should be free because they have a similar
00:25:41.500relationship to the issue of cost. Yet for them, the position is not one where all of the costs
00:25:51.080of providing water should be recuperated through tariffs. The logic is not that all the income
00:25:57.180that these utilities generate will only come from the prices that people pay on their bills.
00:26:03.180There is a sense that you can inject resources that are coming from the state,
00:26:09.860in a way from the central state, from the central government, in a way that you can reduce the cost
00:26:16.660of that bill that comes at the end of the month for users. But here the question of justice is
00:26:24.020also really interesting. Is it fair that a large corporation that is profiting out of water by
00:26:33.900selling bottled water, beer, soda, is it fair for them to not pay for the water that they are using
00:26:44.820when they are commodifying and generating profits out of it? So at this scale, the question
00:26:50.360of justice and the question of thinking about water as a collective issue takes a different
00:26:57.380shape and i think that it is not fair that they don't pay so i don't believe that water should be
00:27:07.500free for those kinds of organizations either so instead my invitation uh and i would like to put
00:27:18.820it that way is to think about when we ask the question should water be free that we think not
00:27:26.580only in the abstract but in specific historical historical and spatial locations so that we can
00:27:36.260accompany the question of where whether water should be free with those two other questions
00:27:42.620whether it is being treated in terms of collectivity and how is it that justice
00:27:49.300is being considered as we answer the question whether it should be free or not
00:27:55.520Such good questions to sit with. Yeah, and how do regulators set a price for something
00:28:03.240that is a human right? And is any margin of profit acceptable? And how are public service
00:28:10.700regulators overseen? And then I think a second part to that question is, given that climate
00:28:16.140change is reducing our available fresh water, and with nearly 3 billion people currently living in
00:28:22.660water stress conditions, how does scarcity impact the cost of water? Yeah, so here, the inherited
00:28:35.080logic in the public sphere is that in capitalist countries or in capitalist societies is that if
00:28:42.120something is scarce, its price should rise. It should be more expensive. But when we're thinking
00:28:48.580about water, that is not necessarily something that makes sense. I mean, we can have a broader
00:28:55.600conversation about whether this market ideology holds in many other areas, but since we're just
00:29:02.220talking about water, the way in which water complicates that question is unique. So I think
00:29:08.020that an overemphasis on the pricing mechanism or in certain ways an access of confidence
00:29:18.780or an access of of belief in the myth of the pricing mechanism is getting us in some trouble
00:29:27.380here so what i mean by this is that the assumption that pricing something is more expensive
00:29:37.980will make people use less of it we know very well that is an assumption that doesn't hold
00:29:47.020it will make those for whom it's very expensive consume less but it might exacerbate the
00:29:53.340consumption of those who have their resources to pay higher prices so
00:29:59.000So the classic example is, you know, households that are in a water stressed area where you have a rationing and block pricing.
00:30:12.400So that is depending on the amount of water, your price goes up and the more you use, the higher the price becomes.
00:30:21.160And you can see households in those areas that continue to fill their pools because they have enough money to pay.
00:30:29.000for higher volumes of water while families where you have large numbers of people living in a
00:30:37.900single household which might have a higher water use than a household with two people
00:30:45.560those people end up not being able to afford this everyday need right so so the question of scarcity
00:30:54.880I think, needs to be considered very carefully. And most importantly, we need to debunk the myth
00:31:03.140that pricing will solve issues that are basically issues of justice and issues of what does it mean
00:31:14.040to live as a collective? What does it mean to live in society? And how is it that we finally
00:31:23.160go beyond this misguided assumption that all we are is individuals and understand that we
00:31:31.920are collectives. Even if ideologically you think you are individually, that doesn't matter. You're
00:31:36.720still part of a collective. You can believe what you want, but you're still a part of a collective
00:31:40.900just because you live in society. So the question of scarcity, I would reorient towards the question
00:31:48.640of justice and collectivity, rather than beginning with the question of pricing. That's how I would
00:31:54.840approach that issue. In an era of climate change, I'm convinced that the starting point needs to be
00:32:01.680a different one, not the question of pricing, but the question of collectivity and justice
00:32:06.880for humans and not humans. Well, I wanted to mention that in December of 2020, and I think
00:32:14.580a lot of people started to see this, that water launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to
00:32:21.600be traded as a commodity like gold or oil. And industry supporters argue that these water
00:32:27.200commodity contracts will allow farmers and municipalities to budget for a resource that
00:32:33.120is predicted to become relatively unstable. Now, others argue that this move jeopardizes our
00:32:38.600understanding of water as a basic human right, while allowing an elite group of individuals to
00:32:43.800make money off of future human suffering. And so plainly, I'd like to ask your thoughts on this
00:32:51.780in context to your work. Yes, December 2020 was really interesting in terms of the public
00:32:59.500conversation that was generated around the first futures contracts that were traded for water.
00:33:06.840The precedent is 2018. That was the moment when financial markets became an instrument to trade water rights. And the 2020 development grows out of that moment of 2018 and the innovation or the change there or the thing that caught people's attention is the idea of water futures.
00:33:31.820So it was not only trade in water in terms of the existing rights, but in terms of what will the price of these rights be in a year time and how can I trade over that in the present.
00:33:44.260So one really important thing, and if the majority of the audience of your podcast is based in the US, I think it's really important to note that this is possible, the 2018 trade and the continuation with the futures in 2020.
00:34:07.880This is only possible because you have the possibility to treat water rights as property and trade them.
00:34:19.660And this is a unique legal economic configuration that is the exception in the world.
00:34:28.280In most places around the world, you cannot do this because water rights are not treated as tradable property.
00:34:36.500so for instance in Costa Rica you don't even have water rights what you have is a license to use
00:34:41.980and if you get a license and you use certain amount of water and your license was for more
00:34:50.460water than than what you used you cannot trade that difference it's either you use it or you
00:34:58.720don't use it. And so all of this to say that at the core of this new development is this idea of
00:35:06.640water rights as property. And it's something that we shouldn't naturalize. It's something that we
00:35:12.820should remember. It's unique to the U.S. context and a couple other countries in the world.
00:35:20.820Australia has had something similar. Chile and South America has had something similar.
00:35:25.340but the rest of the world doesn't think that it is a good idea to trade water rights as even were
00:35:32.300your personal property so just to remind us that something that is happening here in the u.s
00:35:42.900it's unique to its context it's not necessarily what is happening in the rest of the world and
00:35:49.120And for that reason, we shouldn't naturalize it as a global condition.
00:35:54.460Second, these developments are described as a way to make water use more efficient in locations where the resource is scarce.
00:36:06.300And what is another element here is that these mechanisms are proposed as the most efficient and the most powerful ways to do these organizing of water users and existing water quantities, as opposed to any other form that exists in these areas, particularly in California, Southern California, for the most part.
00:36:34.260And here we have evidence from the social sciences, from California itself, but also from many other parts of the world, about the ways in which there are forms of organizing use, water use that are efficient, that are sustainable, and that don't necessarily rely on financial profits as their motivating factor.
00:37:01.060So as you might already begin to hear, my position is that we don't need these kinds of mechanisms. We know what happens when financial profit is the engine that moves investment.
00:37:18.220We saw it in 2008. We just saw it here in California, sorry, in Texas during the Arctic blast when power was lost by most of the state because there was no regulation about the way in which energy or electricity was being produced.
00:37:39.000generators were unregulated. And so the distribution of power in an emergency situation,
00:37:47.740of course, did not fulfill the promise of market-based allocation or the promise that
00:37:54.780the seek or the search for profit will result in investments that secure our infrastructures
00:38:03.820against disaster or catastrophe which we're going to see many more many more in in the era of climate
00:38:13.820change so i think it's it's expectable what's going to happen financial investors that have
00:38:25.600enough resources will put money into these water features and at the moment in which farmers need
00:38:34.880this water a year from now or five years from now the price is going to be such that it's going to
00:38:41.740be extremely high and this volatility although they claim that the mechanism reduces volatility
00:38:50.340But this encounter with the results of heavy investment by financial actors, I do not think that will result in a more sustainable use of water.
00:39:04.220I think that, to the contrary, they will result in a shorter assessment of returns, shorter in terms of time, more short-term assessment of returns that might end up generating more water use rather than conservation.
00:39:23.780So I don't think the financial market is the best mechanism to move us towards a more sustainable use of water resources, particularly in the era of climate change.
00:49:10.940But this idea that war is an option, war is one strategy to deal with a particular situation, is non-existent for us in Costa Rica as a valid strategy just because we just do not have an army.
00:49:28.300And it's really interesting what that does to your thinking as you observe the ubiquity of the war language in other parts of the world.
00:49:39.840So the war language reproduces a patriarchal, domineering mode of thinking.
00:49:47.000As you said, it comes from the colonial tongue.
00:49:50.720And one of the outcomes of war is always death, annihilation, and destruction.
00:49:57.840There might be other things, but that is always part of it.
00:50:02.220And I don't see that language, a language that emphasizes destruction, as one that can inspire and enable the construction of worlds that are more capable of fostering what in Latin America, many groups, indigenous African diaspora and others, are calling buen vivir or living well.
00:50:30.340or I don't see the world language as something that is capable of fostering
00:50:36.900good relations with the land and with others as indigenous peoples in North America have taught us
00:50:44.220so this is not a naive proclamation from me I understand that as I said earlier
00:50:53.400when you when you face the practicalities of making different worlds come alive
00:51:00.740it's not all good and nice there are losses there's suffering there's dispossession
00:51:07.180and so it's not a naive uh vision of a world where we're all happy and harmonious
00:51:15.300To the contrary, it is a realistic orientation towards what we need to preserve worlds and create worlds in which destruction and annihilation is not the orienting set of values.
00:51:36.480the language of war it also activates what one could call the war industrial complex right
00:51:46.580the language of war immediately activates certain kinds of imaginaries of who are the players what
00:51:54.200are the solutions and what are the scales at which this work needs to be done you can
00:52:01.460fill in the blanks there so i don't go on for for too long in terms of who each of those
00:52:08.040who populates each of those categories so i think that i would leave the word
00:52:15.040word language aside i am not scared of the notion that we have problems and dispossession
00:52:23.700and conflicts that we need to deal with the language of injustice is much more
00:52:30.020enabling for me as a way to to mobilize energy knowledge and resources
00:52:40.200to try to address the problems that we're facing but I don't I don't think the the
00:52:46.040war language does very much for us except for
00:52:50.900putting us again in a path that we have been in before you can think of all of the wars that
00:53:00.060have been fought against so many things between nation states in the u.s against poverty against
00:53:05.800drugs etc and and i don't think that the the outcomes of those quote-unquote wars
00:53:14.180those outcomes don't convince me that that framing is necessarily one that will get us
00:53:23.460where we need to be and I actually would invite all of us to remove the that language from our
00:53:31.280vocabulary to not create a shortcut by referring to wars and instead try to think what is it that
00:53:37.240we mean by a war exactly do we mean chaos like you said or do we mean exacerbation of inequality
00:53:46.000or do we mean a hoarding by large corporate actors of water what is it specifically that we
00:53:54.580mean and then mobilize the ideas and the energy and the resistance to prevent those things from
00:54:03.380happening. Thank you for that. That was really relieving to hear and definitely settled my heart.
00:54:12.560And although I have so many questions and so, so much that I want to continue to ask you,
00:54:19.080I will close us out with one last question. Now, you emphasize that the work of the anthropologist
00:54:27.360is to look at local examples. And I do think a more localized approach is being taken,
00:54:32.740whether that is with wastewater recycling, aquifer recharge, or desalination. And that's
00:54:40.740not to say that any of these so-called solutions are without consequence. But I wonder, based on
00:54:47.400your research in Brazil and Costa Rica, what type of organization and forms of water management
00:54:52.720might lead us to more just and equal outcomes? Yeah, great question. I will begin by maybe
00:55:01.940sharing uh how i understand uh the local if you think about uh the book in the book i i try to
00:55:12.200uh put side by side things that were happening at two local spaces or two kinds of local spaces
00:55:19.580one um community organizations or small town public hearings uh or those things that fit
00:55:31.000more with the idea that we have of the local but at the same time another local for me
00:55:37.920are the regulatory agencies or congress specific congress representatives or group of consultants
00:55:47.220in brazil in in the state of seara for instance and the reason i mentioned this is that
00:55:55.440I think it's really important for us to realize that there are only locals in a certain way,
00:56:03.660right? We tend to think about the local versus the global, or maybe the local versus the state,
00:56:11.220but there's people and institutions and offices in the state that turn the state also into a
00:56:19.280local question. And so for me, thinking about the local across those levels, or to put it
00:56:27.920differently, specifying the people and places, when you're thinking at all scales, it's a really
00:56:34.580important analytic move. And it's also politically a really important way to organize your mobilization
00:56:44.060or your intervention or the ways in which you want to identify interlocutors.
00:56:50.520So with that in mind, I think that we need all kinds of organizations.
00:57:00.180And I hope that your listeners don't take this as a cop-out response.
00:57:05.720But what I mean to say is that if we consider this idea of the local
00:57:10.880and how the local could be a small town
00:57:40.120I think that we need public utilities.
00:57:42.680I need that we think community aqueduct associations.
00:57:47.160I think that we need sovereign indigenous nations dealing with the water.
00:57:52.760I think that in some cases, we even need some private companies that are participating in this question of how to move, distribute, and also protect water, both in forests, but also in urban spaces.
00:58:10.120what I think that we need to put side by side with the question of the type of organization
00:58:17.080is the question of the principles that organizations follow and probably you see here that I'm
00:58:24.380there's a certain pattern in the way in which I think about this so a good starting point for
00:58:30.460those principles which need to be translated into concrete decisions every day are the principles
00:58:38.060that are behind the human right to water are these organizations working towards sufficient
00:58:43.360water towards safe water towards acceptable water and acceptable both culturally and biologically
00:58:49.360towards physically accessible water and towards affordable water but these principles which i
00:58:56.620i believe in i also understand that they come from one very specific way of seeing the world
00:59:03.780which is what we call the liberal modern paradigm and this is the idea that we are all equal
00:59:13.960subjects that come that the humans are equal subjects subjects that come together to live
00:59:20.900in society in a nation state that has a certain understanding of rights and responsibilities
00:59:27.040So that's the baggage, so to speak, that the idea of a human right carries.
00:59:33.160But these principles are not enough, nor are they the only principles that exist in the
00:59:41.820There are many principles that exist outside the liberal modern paradigm.
00:59:46.780I talked, I mentioned very briefly the principles of good relations and responsibility, the
00:59:53.040principles of buen vivir, but also we can think of principles of anti-capitalist wealth generation
01:00:02.760and distribution, or principles of anti-racist ways of organizing collective life. And so what
01:00:10.860I would do is think about the different forms that exist where we are in our locations,
01:00:19.220our locations being our particular neighborhood or a state agency or a rural community and think
01:00:27.300what principles are guiding the work that these organizations are doing and how can those
01:00:34.020principles how are they translated into very technical and concrete decisions such as am I
01:00:42.720going to shut off the water main when somebody has been unable to pay their bill or not? Or
01:00:51.140am I going to shut off the water source and guarantee that there's enough drinking water
01:00:59.360if I detect lead in that water, as in Flint, Michigan? So you can think of all of these
01:01:07.060principles and ask of the organizational forms that already exist whether and how they are
01:01:14.380following them and the next question is how to have the imagination and the courage to make sure
01:01:23.360that those translations are happening that those principles are being translated into everyday
01:01:28.680decisions and if necessary change the organizational form so that they can be translated
01:01:36.740And so, it would be hard to identify just one organizational form.
01:01:44.340So, maybe one way in which we can tackle this problem is think about the ecology of organizational forms and ask what are the principles that are guiding their operations.
01:01:56.640and what principles should guide their operations
01:02:00.760as they are translated into very concrete material and technical decisions.
01:02:06.780So not only the proclamation of intention,
01:02:11.460but how are these principles translated
01:02:13.940into very concrete and everyday practical things?
01:02:20.260Well, the hail is really coming down as we close this interview.
01:02:26.640Yeah, it's kind of incredible as we're talking about water and different forms of water. And here we are just being surrounded by it. But Andrea, this has been such a deeply, I mean, it's beyond interesting.
01:02:48.700It's really necessary for us because we all depend on water and we are part of this global