Occupy Wall Street ..... and Water Management

Good to see more civic dialogue about failings in our economy and governance.  If the students, unemployed, union members, and others now talking to each other in the parks and streets turned their attention to water management, what might they see?  A sector that, in the U.S. at least, has largely resisted a wholesale privatization and takeover by Wall Street.  But that doesn't mean that a water-industrial complex doesn't exist in the design and construction of the centralized water and wastewater collection and treatment grid (see earlier blog on Cynthia Barnett's new book, Blue Revolution).  Can this industry self-correct, by guiding the emergence of a more sustainable approach in decentralized and integrated systems?  Unlikely.  Too much money to be made in the old ways. Yes, there are scrappy clean tech entrepreneurs trying to get a toehold in the new ways.  But, it's clear to me that pressures for a paradigm shift in water have to come as well from civil society, where the escalating costs and increasing public health and ecosystem threats are directly felt at the local level.  Citizens need to push for a redirection of capital investments into projects and technologies that generate greater benefits for their communities and the environment and to raise the alarm for equity and environmental justice.   We're all wondering where Occupy Wall Street will head, but for the time being, more talk about the basic structural flaws in our institutions could be a good thing.