A Future History of Water

Abstract

This page intentionally left blankintroduction Around noon on the fourth day of the World Water Forum, held in 2006 at Mexico City's convention center, fifty out of the ten thousand participants managed to sneak in the necessary tools to stage a surprise protest. As the demonstrators went through the metal detectors that turned entry doors into security checkpoints, the guards inspecting their personal belongings ignored the water bottles, small coins, and folded pieces of cloth that they were bringing into the building. The would-be protestors walked briskly toward the lobby, where three levels of meeting rooms connected through an intricate system of balconies and escalators, creating an ideal stage for attracting an audience. Within minutes, empty plastic water bottles emerged, coins were dropped into them, and cloth signs unfurled. The protestors began shaking their bottles rhythmically and chanting: El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! El agua es un derecho, no es una mercancía! (Water is a right, not a commodity! Water is a right, not a commodity!)With the opposition between a right and a commodity, the demonstrators were not invoking just any right; they were referring to the human right to water. Their voices were tactically recruiting water's universalism to denounce the injustices and dispossession occurring around the world as a result of its commodification. Their chant was more than a mere demonstration slogan; it was a calculated rhetorical move marking the practical and material distinctions between human rights and commodities. The demonstrators were convinced, as were many other participants in the forum, that water should be a universal human right accessible to all, and for that reason should never be commodified. But they also knew that those distinctions need to be produced in all sorts of places; courts were not the only spaces where rights were enacted, and markets did not hold a monopoly over commoditization practices. introduction introduction about water's confounding nature. They were conceptual things, material abstractions.These protest bottles, with their unruly embroilments, became the conceptual locus of my research on the technolegal politics of water. What kind of relation was there between the activists' words, with their clear partitions, and the bottles in their hands, with the transubstantiation they suggested? If water is to be a human right, and not a commodity, how do you differentiate these two legal and economic formulations? And more generally, how do people create distinctions and bifurcations if the world in which they live constantly drifts toward entanglement, blurring stark oppositions?These questions are not only relevant to our thinking about the politics of water, they go beyond. Human rights and commodities directly shape or distantly hover over much of the organization of value, collective life, and nature. The relations between property and body parts, health and healing, food, nature, and even access to the internet are all discussed through similar o...

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