The Global South : Blue Gold

This week’s presentation was on the Global South and movements around the world. I found it interesting how the north and south react to global issues in such different ways. While the North reacts with money and tries to solve all their problems with it and technology, the South tends to use their bodies and voices to physically stop inhumane acts. This is an interesting feature of the Global South and leaves me wondering how individuals in foreign countries feel when northern activists come in and try to solve their cities problems with money.
The presentation then focused on the Water Wars in Bolvia which I found to be an interesting case study into an issue of the Global South. In Cochabamba the privatization of water would result in unsanitary and health risk concerns for a community that could not pay for the life necessity. The film Flow focuses then on the movements around the world and the externalities too often spared for the benefit of the Northern capitalist. Strategies used throughout the film included literacy movements, foot marchs, and local solutions to make a difference in their home town. I found it awful that the technology to keep many of these poor families alive could have been invented long ago (the water pump solar electric system) but wasn’t because of environmental racism and capitalist advancement.
Maude Barlow, who wrote Blue Gold discusses the plotting of a global take over of one of the worlds most precious and natural resources. How it is to be done on a global scale may be a threat we should watch out for in the future. I continue to wonder how companies feel they have the right to rain that falls from the sky. This new “oil”, the gold of the future, is a limited and precious resource and seems to be a race to the privatization and ownership to its power.