Ecopsychology: Water – A Fundamental Human Right

[Exploring Life] Can an individual or organization claim the right to own and profit from a natural resource that is essential to the preservation and well being of all life on our planet? The battle to claim ownership and control the world’s fresh water supply brings us to the particular nexus where money, the natural environment, and the vagaries of human culture intersect, often in a manner that painfully reveals the deeply rooted of human traditions of greed, want, and consumption. In other words, humanity has not yet learned to live in harmony and equanimity with the natural forces that are the basis of all life. The struggle and looming catastrophe surrounding the world’s fresh water supplies is a stark example of how immature and and inept our capacity for learning really is.

Natural Resource: Right or Privilege?

Water is, of course, essential to all life on this planet. Without it life ends. Given this, water can only be right right; it is never a privilege or a commodity. There is no valid claim to ownership that can be made over any natural resource that is the basis for living. Nor can any individual or organization be trusted in this capacity.

History provides an endless flow of evidence to support to statement that human progress is permeated with death, destruction, domination, violence, separation, and extreme naivety. The evidence of our failure is obvious in all forms of cultural enterprise including politics, religion, charity, and business. This failure originates in the belief that humankind has, in a bizarre twist of mind that can only be described as a form of mass mental illness, special status in our world and can therefore claim special status in the world. To trust in the current ideal of progress is to put one’s faith in failure and the eventual collective destruction that flows from it.

Of course, there are people in the world that dedicate themselves to opposing the psychopathic and suicidal reality of progress. Yet these people are clearly in the minority, otherwise we would not find ourselves in the circumstances we are in. The fact that we have to even raise the question of whether water is a fundamental human right versus a privilege or commodity is enough evidence in itself to reveal that we are, as a collective, woefully misguided, self-centered, and arrogant.

Article 31: Water is a right, not a privilege

Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance. (Article 31: Water is a Right)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) consists of thirty articles that outline the fundamental human rights of everyone in the human family and attempts to protect those rights through law. It is one of the most important documents produced by humankind since it takes on the immense challenge of identifying and protecting basic human right regardless of country, race, political alliance, or religious perspective. The thirty articles of the UDHR have not be updated since 1948.

Now, sixty years later, recognizing that over a billion people across the planet lack access to clean and potable water and that millions die each year as a result, it is imperative to add one more article to this historic declaration, the Right to Water.

We, the undersigned, respectfully call upon the United Nations to add a 31st article to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishing access to clean and potable water as a fundamental human right. (Article 31: Water is a Right)

Article 31 is a proposed addition to the UDHR that would serve to include the right to fresh potable water supplies to all of humanity. This means that the supply of clean water cannot be owned, controlled, or commercialized by any individual or group.

What Makes Water a Universal Right?

The sludge of human intention is all too often revealed through the impact we have on others and the natural world. To say that progress has in general had a beneficial effect on the lives of others and our planet is to be utterly delusional. To denigrate this glaringly obvious reality into a mere criticism or cynicism is to succumb to fear and insecurity. Quite simply, the collective impact of humanity on the Earth has been self-serving, destructive, and inept – eventually, unless we change our capacity for learning, this will become unavoidably fatal.

The struggle to declare water as a fundamental human right is an opportunity to lift ourselves up out of the sludge and set an example that humanity can aspire toward learning that values the preservation and well being of all life above anything else. Fresh water supply is a finite resource on this planet. If we contaminate it, we contaminate ourselves as well as all other life forms. If we fail to provide for all life, then we denigrate the very meaning and essence of humanity and we remain mired in the sludge of modern progress.

To achieve this, it is essential to eliminate any possibility of corporate ownership or involvement with respect to fresh water supply. Water belongs to the universal commons of life; we do not own water but we are responsible to cherish and preserve it. Since a corporation is by its very nature unavoidably irresponsible and self-serving in its pursuit of profit, there is no place for corporate involvement. There is no business of water to be pillaged and conquered. The regulation of fresh water can only be a public endeavour to be preserved and protected by the commons.

Water is a universal right simply because it is a universal prerequisite for the preservation of life. This is not an ideal that can merely be taught in school or broadcast through the media; it is an ideal that must simply embraced as a normal assumption of being alive. The preservation of all life is an innate responsibility of everyone on this planet, and if we fail in this responsibility we effectively commit suicide.

Water and Our Capacity for Learning

The success or failure in the challenge of rescuing water from our own greed and want is at its core a fundamental challenge for learning. Water as a fundamental human right requires us to face our own assumptions, change them, and live differently. In changing our assumptions in order to live differently we face the uncomfortable reality of admitting our own flaws and weakness in a manner that reaches into our minds and hearts.

To do this we must acknowledge that progress as an intersection of material consumption, delusional marketing and advertising, technological prowess, governmental flatulence, and commercial profit will never be anything more than a bog of eternal stench. Learning in its most powerful form demands that we face the things we avoid and pulls us however unwillingly into the murky depths of our own folly.

This is what learning really is and what it must be. Humanity must embrace learning as a means to find another path, to make fundamental shifts not only in our beliefs and assumptions but in the things we do. Real progress is not related to money and profit in any meaningful way. A corporation is nothing more than a very bad idea that has managed to survive far too long. If water is the “content” of learning, then the ultimate stake is the preservation and well being of life itself.