Flow

Audrey Newcomb April 5, 2010 Sustainability Problems //**Film Annotation: "Flow"** “Do we come here to spend most of our time in nonliving boxes?”// “Flow”, directed by Irena Salina and released in 2008

Just like “Blue Gold,” “Flow” explored the world’s water shortage and increasing privatization of the commodity. “Blue Gold” featured several American communities or people (Maine, Michigan, Atlanta and Ryan, founder of Ryan’s Well) while “Flow” mainly featured communities that are foreign to me (poor African communities). One advantage “Flow” had in featuring the foreign communities is that their spiritual reverence for water was captured. Indians hold funeral ceremonies at the Ganges River because it holds so much spiritual meaning. However, this also affected the audience that would be most sympathetic to “Flow.” “Flow” requires the audience to be interested in humanitarian efforts. I think that "Flow"'s educational value could have been enhanced by not focusing on other countries as much. "Blue Gold"did a better job at presenting the water problem as a scientific one when they feature our alternate water cycle in a classroom setting. “Flow” directly confronted the question of whether water can be owned, and the film opened with the fact that water is the third largest industry in the world, only behind oil and electricity. Later a lawyer asserted that “things that are transient cannot be owned.” This is an interesting thought and certainly advocated for the public use and control of water, but this reasoning cannot be used to fight water privatization before our definition of “ownership” completely revolves. Even if “things that are transient” is in reference to the duration the “things’” are used by the body, many commodities fall in this category and we still pay for them (food is obviously transient, and I would argue that even oil and electricity are transient). Perhaps the lawyer based his statement not on precedence but on what he believes should be true. In this case, the reasoning that “things that are transient cannot be owned” prompts a complete legal and cultural change in the definition ownership. During the movie I was convinced by this lawyer’s seemingly simple of test of whether something can be owned or not. However, the complications that accompany statement leave “Flow” with underdeveloped logic against the principle of water privatization.

The World Bank was targeted as a sustainability problem. “Flow” did a better job explaining the World Bank. The World Bank forced Bolivian farmers to accept water privatization or else they would be cut off from other funds. The World Bank is also the chief funder of big damn projects, and no one can take the World Bank to court, even if they are displaced from their land and receive no compensation as promised. Dams as a water storing technology are a sustainability problem. The water in a dam can emit 20 times more greenhouse gases than a coal plant because the organic matter in the water rots and emits methane. Again the power of corporations is pinpointed as a sustainability problem. Nestle used tactics of intimidation (hiring private investigators to go door to door) to frighten Michigan citizens who had signed a petition against the bottling of their local water. In another case, a Coca Cola worker in Africa refused to talk to Maude Barlow and other activists and was ultimately really rude them. Being “really rude” turns into a sustainability problem when a man in a suit thinks it is appropriate to ignore an entire thirsty community peacefully protesting. The EPA’s lax regulation of water pollutants has allowed us to become “experiments for synthetic chemicals.” The extent to which regulation of the water bottling industry is limited (less than 1 person) is astounding. The western paradigm of our relation to nature and our posterity is a problem. One man commented that the white man “kidnaps the earth from his children and does not care.” “Flow” was better at establishing our erroneous fetish with bottled water. “Flow” stated that the U.N. estimates that $30 billion would be needed to provide clean drinking water for the world but we spend three times that amount on bottles water! Advertising and consumerism is to blame for the delusional need for bottled water.

If the $30 billion could be collected and diverted to a responsible organization, then following suggestions in “Flow” can provide clean water to poor countries. “Flow” presented several viable technologies that can help communities clean their water without sacrificing it to a corporation. Ashok Gadgil has invented “UV Waterworks” which uses an aluminum reflector and UV light from the sun to sanitize water. “Flow” depicted several of these devices providing water to a rural town and maintained by one trained citizen. Playground pumps were implemented successfully in a poor, rural, foreign community. These technologies are helpful, but only address one part of the matrix of water problems. In the U.S., chemicals should be regulated in order to prevent irreversible poisoning of our water supply (this theme was also explored in “Homo Toxicus”). Corporations should be held accountable to respecting the community they are in and only providing it with benefits. Better oversight of the water bottling industry, taking away the corporation’s right to be a person, and reducing their ability to affect world organizations (World Trade Organization) could humble the corporation. “Flow” recognizes the addition of water to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an important priority as well.

I was not convinced that a religious infatuation with water is necessarily a good. I am also not convinced that “things that are transient cannot be owned” as an argument is substantial.

At one point Flow asked, “Who is the World Bank?” Although “Flow” elaborated on the World Bank more than any other sustainability film, I would be interested in learning more about its structure and objectives.

The most compelling part of viewing “Flow” was listening to the environmental lawyer, expert on water problems, and professor at Pace Law School speak afterwards. He mentioned many grim statistics of the number of people who die from unclean water, and he reviewed the failure of American government and society to accomplish the goal of the Federal Clean Water Act of 1972 to create clean water by 1985. He had a lot of experience with arguing against corporations and knows a lot about New York water problems. However, out of all of the knowledge he could have imparted on his audience of college students, he picked the precise anecdote that we needed to hear, or at least I needed to hear. First he told us that climbing out of our environmental problems will required innovation, and as students at a top engineering school, we should be chock full of it. But unlike in my technical classes, he did not equate innovation with invention. Rather, he defined it as improving policies, practices, technologies, and management to be better than the status quo. Additionally “innovation can mean going back to old methods.” The world is expecting us, he said, expecting college graduates to tackle the mess of the world! One time he had a conversation at IBM with the manager of IBM laboratories who happens to be an RPI graduate. The pretense for the lawyer to be in the IBM manager’s office must have business but the conversation somehow became contemplative. The IBM manager had looked out his window at the parking at asked the lawyer “Do you know what I see?” The environmental lawyer thought the manager was going to trying to impress with knowledge of the affects of impermeable surfaces, however the manager said he saw kayak racks. The sea of kayak racks, the manager said, indicated that his work force was completely different than any he had seen before. They are brilliant and hard-working, but at the end of the day want they really want is to make a difference and live consciously. Evidently the ideals we talk about in sustainability are more prevalent in the corporate world than I thought. The status quo is to improve on the status quo!