[The following has been written and sumbitted to UAA Dr, Danielle Elliott's ANTH 490 Fall 2011]
This film, produced by Irena Salina, is a documentary about the impacts of industrialization and the commoditization of water on communities, environment, and humans. Water provision is not typically seen as a lucrative business, but this film exposes the great extent to which this actually is the case; the market for bottled water is highly profitable, even where tap water is readily available and equally pristine. Particularly in lands where fresh water is ubiquitous, such as Alaska
The format of the film is typical of popular documentaries today showing footage of landscapes intermixed with interviews of various professionals who are doing most of the narrating. In this way, viewers are not put-off by feeling that the producer is simply pushing his personal views; true to ethnographic anthropological argumentation, the audience is shown environments, personal experiences, and professional opinions without explicit disclosure of opinion. In this tradition, an author shows carefully selected and ordered bits of information to bring the audience to conclusions that they have not personally expressed. This strategy makes critique difficult. The setting for this film spans across the globe, from rural to urban, highlighting thematically related stories of water pollution, water privatization, and environmental transformation.
Water Pollution
Water pollution comes in two forms: microbial and chemical. There are 116,000 manmade chemicals, and we really don’t know the extent to which these harm ecosystems or our bodies (06:00). These chemicals are unleashed in the form of pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and industrial or agricultural waste.
The green revolution brought two major detriments to fresh water supplies globally: first, the crops in this system are highly inefficient, requiring five to ten times more water in order to dissolve the chemicals used (07:04); second, massively incalculable amounts of hazardous chemicals have been released in the ecosystem causing recognized harm to humans and animals.
Birth defects in Mexico Europe , primarily in areas with heavy pesticide use. Tasmanian cancer rates shoot up 200% after heavy use of pesticides. Fish are changing sex. In Texas
What does this have to do with capitalism? Atrazine is a popular pesticide in the United States
The film is very one-sided in that it fails to recognize the presence of logical opposition in favor of industry that has collaterally caused unfortunate environmental detriment. This will undoubtedly turn off many ‘economic conservative’ viewers to the idea of adding environmental concern to their ideology. In the art of persuasion, to demonize one’s opponent is to solicit for progress a quagmire. Over the Green Revolution, debaters might as well call each other ‘smelly hippies’ or ‘fascist pigs’. One side will say, “You are heartless and stupid, can’t you see the environmental degradation?”and the other will say, “You are heartless and stupid, can’t you see the hungry people?”
Privatization
How does one do anything in this world without subscribing to capitalism, and therein to inequality and exploitation? If you want to build a water treatment facility in Sudan
I believe that the privatization of fresh water access (like many other supplies) often begins with good intentions for dire needs (14:50). As this film illustrates though, there are better solutions to fresh water demands then making deals with multinational corporations like Suez India
Anthropological through and through, the issues raised in Flow: for Love of Water beg questions of man’s historical relationship with water. From the peaceful protests of upstate Michigan residents to the riots of Cochabamba , Bolivia Nancy Scheper-Hughes Hughes 2003:207).
For me, and for traditional anthropology, I believe the question to be, “Why are so many people living in places where disease is rampant, food and water are scarce at best, and environment is viscous?” When there is so much death and suffering in a region of the world, why are there so many people there? When the history of man is explained as millions of years of differential survival and migration, why Malthus , do so many people inhabit the uninhabitable? When waves of migration were first lapping against the Americas over 15,000 years ago, and the search for ideal ecology pushed people thousands of miles to the lush fertile lands of Mississippi, Central America, and Brazil, why did the Dorset and Thule Indians take to the harsh, unforgiving, barren arctic for thousands of years?
For an anthropological study through capitalism, human progress and human prosperity can be juxtaposed. In some ways they go hand-in-hand such as hydrological technology and labor providing electricity for millions in China , and other times not, such as hydrological technology and labor displacing millions in China
Personally, I enjoyed the film because it highlighted the cost that humans pay for modernity and some victories that have been made in the war against powers of evil in high places. The former is related to a term project of mine and the latter gives hope in an otherwise depressing discourse of human-induced human suffering. The one-sidedness that I mentioned earlier made me reluctant to entirely believe some of the stories, though my doubts are relatively small. There are inclusions and neglects that an author makes that will make or break the amount of trust an audience will feel; if I feel that a writer is directly soliciting an emotional response from me my guard is thrown up and I am suspicious; greater is my suspicion though, when I realize a writer misquotes someone, ridicules a person/position, or neglects to mention counterevidence.
References
Irena Salina
2008 Flow: For Love of Water. 83mins. The Water Project LLC.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
2003 Rotten Trade: Millennial Capitalism, Human Values and Global Justice in Organs Trafficking. Journal of Human Rights 2(2): 197-226
