Transcript: ANDREA BALLESTERO on a Future History of Water /247
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Andrea Ballestero.
Andrea Ballestero In an era of climate change, I'm convinced that the starting point needs to be a different one - not the question of pricing, but the question of collectivity and justice for humans and non-humans.
Ayana Young Andrea Ballestero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and she is also the founder and director of the Ethnography Studio. Her background includes a law degree, training in Natural Resource Policy, and a PhD in anthropology. She has more than fifteen years of experience researching how societies define, distribute, and value water. Her recent book, A Future History of Water, examines the daily work of implementing the human right to water in Costa Rica and in Northeast Brazil. This book is open access and available for download for free on her website.
Well, Andrea, thank you so much for being with us today. I'm really looking forward to talking with you. I respect your work and your knowledge so much. So thanks for being on the show.
Andrea Ballestero Thank you, Ayana. It's really wonderful to have this opportunity to talk with you and to reach your audience, and I'm really honored to be here.
Ayana Young Yes, well, thank you. I want to start by saying that you highlight the power and ubiquity of water, and in The Anthropology of Water you chart its pervasiveness; how it’s responsible for everyday objects like blue jeans, and bread, and coffee, it’s essential for fracking, defined through watersheds, and also exists as a healing modality - yet most of us take water for granted as a mundane necessity, not recognizing how tightly woven it is in religion, politics, science, and the economy. To ground listeners in this conversation, I wonder if you can share what is fundamental for us to understand about water at this moment in time?
Andrea Ballestero Thank you, I like to think of this question of the foundations or the fundamental nature of water by thinking directly and embracing its changing form. In other words, that which is fundamental about water is not a single baseline or not one thing that is sitting there as a kernel, but instead, it's this capacity and the properties by which it is constantly changing form, it is conveying the possibility of multiple relations, and consequently, also changing meaning, or having multiple meanings at once. So we know that for instance, water can be part of your kin, it could be a being that you take care of as you take as you care for your grandmother or your grandfather, your aunt, it’s, of course, crucial for all forms of life for the fundamental biological processes of life. But at the same time, it challenges so many of the ideas that we take for granted as opposition's or contradictions.
So for instance, water helps us think about what is natural, but it also helps us think about what is human-made, we use water to identify the natural environment. So for instance, when we think about a river, when we think about a lake, the ocean, but at the same time, when you see a fountain or when you see a pipe, it helps you understand what is the built environment. And furthermore, water challenges in very interesting ways, the ways in which the border between what is live and what is inert is set. So if one asks, “Is water alive?” We almost have a hard time answering this question because we want to say of course it is when it is not if you think in a very narrow kind of way.
So what is fundamental about water for me, it's this constant changing meaning and form and I think that that constant change also reveals some of the fundamental contradictions and injustices of contemporary life. So you can think of water as something that now is being traded in the stock market, at the same time that water is something that millions and millions of people around the world lack for their everyday needs. So it can make your everyday life less difficult when you use water to shower, to brush your teeth - when you can do that by just opening a faucet. But at the same time, it can push humans to the limits of dignity and wellbeing when you don't have that everyday availability. Water can be scarce, but you can also overwhelm us with its magnificent volume when you're experiencing floods or when you're connecting with the ocean for instance.
So a something that connects us with multiple forms of life, and with different types of being, really water helps us understand our health helps us make sense about what life is, and at this moment in human history, it's doing so even by posing questions about the planetary and extra-planetary. So if you think about how important it was for scientists to identify traces of water in Mars, to understand what life is, both here on planet Earth and beyond. So it's that magnificent capacity to exist in multiple forums and in changing forums, and with those changing muses, and changing meanings. And that, I think, is the fundamental thing that we need to come to terms with, in order to face the conditions of life in our planet at the present moment. And I should say, I should clarify here that this is something that this fundamental property is something that many people in the world are aware of, but other people are not. And what I mean to say by this is that when you live in a capitalist society, and when you're an urban being, sometimes you might forget about these things. But there are groups of people around the world that have not forgotten, or that are very aware and organize their daily lives in connection with this idea of changing form, changing uses, and changing meanings.
Ayana Young Wow, Andrea, that was such a beautiful introduction. Thank you for your words, and your thought, and your soul behind these huge topics. And I'll just say that I have such an appreciation for water, much more than I did when I was younger, partially because when I moved out to Cougar Mountain, I had no running water or electricity for two years and the type of just physical endurance of moving water by oneself is an enormous task. And when I finally piped water to a sink, that I could actually turn on the faucet it was it was like a miracle moment. And it really made me take a step back and just realize how much infrastructure has to happen in order for us to turn on the water for those of us who do have it in our houses, or offices, or wherever it happens to come out that's convenient for us. It's actually a huge project to get that water directly to us and how grateful that we all should really be to have access to clean water directly to us, for those of us who do so thank you so much for speaking to those different facets. Now, in 2010, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing the right to safe and clean water for drinking and sanitation as a human right, yet I believe over 2 billion people still lack access to clean water...and conversations on water privatization remain salient. Your book A Future History of Water, explores the tension and intricacies that exist in between a human right and a commodity. Before we delve into water futures, regulation, and pricing - can you explain how human rights and commodities are given definition through regulatory and governing bodies?
Andrea Ballestero Yes, and this connects really nicely to your previous comment in terms of the huge effort and the huge amount of energy that is required to bring water, to move water, and to put it in particular places, so that some humans have access to it, or some ecosystems can keep the water in their space. One thing that I am really interested in is that everyday work and so when I approach the question of what does it mean to say that water is a human right or water is a commodity, I approach it not necessarily from an abstract philosophical point of view, but as an anthropologist, by looking at the things that people are doing on the ground, to give concrete meaning to those two ideas. So taking that into consideration, what I'm going to talk about now are those ways in which, through everyday actions and in everyday work, people are making concrete, these somewhat abstract notions of a human right and a commodity.
So let's begin with a commodity, so to say that water is a commodity, in reality, is to diagnose a continuum, a series of institutional rules and ways of approaching water that we see all around us when we leave in capitalist economic systems. So in a very broad sense, we could say for instance paying for water as a service, that is the bill that you get at the end of the month, whether you get the bill yourself or that is included in your rent, that is one form of commodification. Why? Because we are exchanging the service, the water service, in this case, using economic means - money either, well fewer people these days use physical money, but it may be through your credit card or even some people through Bitcoin. But that's one in a very broad sense, what the commodification of water entails, exchanging it using economic means. But in a more precise sense, to think about the commodification of water is yes to think about its exchange through the use of money, as in the example I gave, but furthermore, to understand that such exchange needs to happen, according to market ideologies of supply and demand, that is according to the idea that if you let market forces of supply and demand, you will reach prices that are appropriate in one way or another.
In economic theory, there are tons of concepts that help explain the caveats that one should take to this notion of supply and demand. But in general, this idea of marketization this idea that supply and demand will help allocate resources in an appropriate or efficient would be the technical way is behind a more precise sense of what the commodification of water means. And this has implications for whether water can be traded in the financial market, or not, whether you can have water rights that you can sell or not, whether you can stop paying your utility and, you know, keep getting a water service at home or not. So there are all sorts of practical implications to this idea.
So that is one model to put it in explanatory terms, although, as we might discuss a little bit later. And as I show in the book, this dichotomy is a little bit more, it's a little bit troubled, in reality, it's not as clean as it sounds. Now, on the other hand, you have the idea of water as a human right. When you think about it in those terms, then you're introducing another set of considerations into how we value allocate and distribute water. So it's not only supply and demand or economic instruments, but there are other things that also come to matter. So, in terms of principle, you could say that by saying that water is a human right, you are recognizing that it is a fundamental entitlement, something that is crucial for the maintenance of human life. And for that reason, cannot be organized only following ideologies of market supply and demand or ideologies of profit or ideologies of endless growth.
In 2010, as you said, the UN passed the resolution record uniting water access and sanitation as human rights. Unfortunately, the United States abstained in that vote, claiming procedural and technical issues, as the U.S. often does, in the space of the international relation, where they use these ideas of these technicalities to justify why they're not going to go with resolutions that are broadly accepted globally. So in this case, in 2010, the U.S. was accompanied by 40 other countries that abstained, but 122 countries around the world recognized passed a resolution recognizing water as a human right. And in the definition, that they accepted, they identify five characteristics that have come to guide, what we understand is the implication of this recognition. The text says that in order to be a human right, water access needs to be sufficient, it needs to be safe. It needs to be acceptable, both in biological and cultural terms, it needs to be physically accessible, which goes to your point about how close or far water sources are from your home. And most importantly, it needs to be affordable. I shouldn't say most importantly, I think that came out because I focused on that in part of my book, but the fifth point is its affordability. And why is the affordability so interesting here, because in it, we find this tension between the idea for human rights and a commodity, in a certain way, when you say that water is affordable, or it needs to be affordable, you're embracing the idea that you're going to exchange it and for the most part, this was going to happen using some medium of exchange money initially. So when you say that human rights are affordable, you begin to see the implications of the two models, the human rights and the commodity models, and the difficulty of keeping them completely separate from each other.
Ayana Young In The Ethics of a Formula: Calculating a Financial-Humanitarian Price for Water, you write; “In the case of water, especially given its status as a human right, citizens and many regulators tend to be suspicious of what market pricing can accomplish. But this mistrust is not a rejection of prices in general. In Costa Rica, people readily accept that they should pay for water. What they are suspicious of are prices produced by markets because, at least as they relate to water, markets usually conceal intentions to extract as much profit as possible.” And I think for many, if we view water as a human right - then it should be free, and for others who are leaning towards an understanding of water, land, soil, not as a resource but as a relative, this is also somewhat counterintuitive. Should water be free, and if not, why?
Andrea Ballestero That's an excellent question and you're two examples remind us of what I was saying at the beginning, about the multiplicity and changing relations that different communities have with water. So I think that one important distinction here is whether we're talking about pricing water per se, versus talking about the ways in which we can pay or make water-rich people and communities in different places. I remember very clearly, when I was doing fieldwork, I was at a community meeting. And there was a conversation where people were having different points of view between two, a lady and a gentleman, both of which were part of the community aqueduct association, in that particular area of Costa Rica. And she was telling him, I'm paraphrasing here, but these were basically her words: “Yes, God, and nature gave us water, but it is too bad that they didn't put it on your doorstep.” And what she was referring to here was that them as a community organization, when they were facing this obligation to make sure that the households in their small rural community all had water that reached at least the entrance of their property, if not all the way into their houses, that work has a cost, because you have to, and here we return to the question of the practicalities of everyday life, we have to buy pipes, somebody has to have the time, the labor, and the energy to dig in the ground to put the pipes in, somebody has to have the knowledge about how to make two pipes of different sizes connect with each other and those are also questions of labor, right.
So in communities where somebody would have to not go to work in the fields, attending to their plot, but would have to spend two weeks helping install these pipes, there's a question of labor that was important to be recognized from their point of view. And so what this lady was conveying is like, of course, there's a way in which, if this is a collective infrastructure, there are costs of buying chlorine and keeping the pump going that need to be covered in one way or another. How is it that we're going to do it? In Costa Rica, this is done in two ways. On the one hand, there is the largest public utility, publicly owned, meaning owned by the state not publicly traded, which collects money to make big investments into infrastructures. And once these infrastructures are put in place, they often pass on the management of the aqueduct to these community organizations, where they are responsible for running the system in their every day, they employ one person in their community, or more than one depending on the size of the community and these are the bodies that are in charge of the everyday activities. So if you ask the people that are part of their systems, they think it's okay to pay for water, even though what they mean is to pay for the service of water provision. Now, like you nicely pointed, this is not necessarily the same point of view that other communities might have. And so what is crucial, I believe, here is to understand the fundamental idea that water is always a collective concern and not an individual good, and so how that collective decides to embrace the very practical question about how is it that we're going to move this water? That is the key for me, asking how is it in that collective understanding, how is it that questions of justice are brought to bear? If we presume that justice is an intrinsic question for any collectivity.
Now, I'm giving you an example, a small-scale example, about how the question of whether water should be free or not, can be addressed. If we scale up a little bit, and we think about large providers in large urban spaces, for instance, in the case of Costa Rica, that would be there's just one municipal utility that tends to one area in the Central Valley. And then in the rest of the country, there is just another publicly owned by the central government utility that provides water for the rest of their big urban spaces. In their case, when you ask them, “What do you mean by saying that water should be a human right?” Their answer is different. They evidently don't think that water should be free, because they have a similar relationship to the issue of cost. Yet, for them, the position is not one where all of the costs of providing water should be recuperated through tariffs. The logic is not that all the income that these utilities generate will only come from the prices that people pay on their bills, there is a sense that you can inject resources that are coming from the state, in a way from the central state from the central government in a way that you can reduce the cost of that bill that comes at the end of the month for users. But here the question of justice is also really interesting. Is it fair? That a large corporation that is profiting off of water by selling bottled water, beer, soda, is it fair for them to not pay for the water that they are using when they're commodifying, and generating profits out of it? So at this scale, the question of justice, and the question of thinking about water as a call as a collective issue, takes a different shape and I think that it is not fair, that they don't pay. So I don't believe that water should be free for those kinds of organizations either. So instead, my invitation, and I would like to put it that way, is to think about when we ask the question, should water be free that we think not only in the abstract, but in specific historical and spatial locations so that we can accompany the question of whether water should be free with those two other questions, whether it is being treated in terms of collectivity, and how is it that justice is being considered when we answer the question of whether it should be free or not.
Ayana Young Such good questions to sit with and thank you for complicating this for us. I think it's really important and I'm thinking, how do regulators set a price for something that is a human right? And is any margin of profit acceptable? And how are public service regulators overseen? And then I think the second part of that question is, given that climate change is reducing our available freshwater, and with nearly 3 billion people currently living in water stress conditions, how does scarcity impact the cost of water?
Andrea Ballestero The inherited logic in the public sphere is that in capitalist countries, or in capitalist societies is that if something is scarce its price should rise, it should be more expensive. But when we're thinking about water, that is not necessarily something that makes sense. I mean, we can have a broader conversation about whether this market ideology holds in many other areas, but since we're just talking about water, the way in which water complicates that question is unique. So I think that an overview emphasis on the pricing mechanism, or in certain ways, an excess of confidence, or an excess of belief in the means of the pricing mechanism is getting us in some trouble here. So what I mean by this is that the assumption that pricing something as more expensive will make people use less of it, we know very well that it is an assumption that doesn't hold, it will make those for whom it's really expensive, consume less, but it might exacerbate the consumption of those who have the resources to pay higher prices.
So the classic example is, you know, households that are in a water-stressed area where you have rationing and block pricing, so that is dependent on the amount of water your price goes up and the more you use, the higher the price becomes and you can see households in those areas that continue to fill their pools are because they have enough money to pay for higher volumes of water, while families where you have large numbers of people living in a single household, which might have higher water use than a household with two people, those people end up not being able to afford this everyday need. Right, so the question of scarcity, I think, needs to be considered very carefully. And most importantly, we need to debunk the myth that pricing will solve issues that are basically issues of justice and issues of what does it mean to live as a collective? What does it mean to live in society? And how is it that we finally go beyond this misguided assumption that all we are is individuals, and understand that we are collectives, even if ideologically you think you are an individual, that doesn't matter, you're still part of a collective, you can believe what you want, but you're still a part of the collective just because you live in society.
So the question of scarcity, I would reorient towards the question of justice and collectivity, rather than beginning with the question of pricing. That's how I would approach that, that issue. In an era of climate change, I am convinced that the starting point needs to be a different one, not the question of pricing, but the question of collectivity and justice for humans and not humans. The other point I wanted to add that I forgot to say, that is really tied to my work, my ethnographic work is that there are more people that we think, are than we assume that think this way. And many of those people you find in regulatory agencies and in utilities, and so I guess, the invitation is to think maybe, that there are more people that think that way than originally think, and that sometimes they are in spaces that we usually take for granted a space where won't have people that think this way. So in a way to be open to finding fellow travelers in unexpected places.
Ayana Young Well, I wanted to mention that in December of 2020, water launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to be traded as a commodity like gold or oil, and industry supporters argue that these water-commodity contracts will allow farmers and municipalities to budget for a resource that is predicted to become relatively unstable, others argue that this move jeopardizes our understanding of water a basic human right, while allowing an elite group of individuals to make money off of future human suffering. And so, plainly, I’d like to ask your thoughts on this in context to your work?
Andrea Ballestero Yes, December 2020, was really interesting. In terms of the public conversation that was generated around the first futures contracts that were traded for water. The precedent is 2018, which was the moment when financial markets became an instrument to trade water rights, and the 2020 development grows out of that moment in 2018 and the innovation or the change there, or the thing that caught people's attention is the idea of water futures. So it was not only trading water in terms of the existing rights but in terms of what will the price of these rights be in a year time? And how can we trade over that in the present? So one really important thing, and if the majority of the audience of your podcast is based in the U.S., I think it's really important to note that this is possible, the 2018 trade and the big continuation with the futures in 2020. This is only possible because you have the possibility to treat water rights as property and trade them. And this is a unique legal economic configuration that is the exception in the world, it's not the rule. In most places around the world, you cannot do this, because water rights are not treated as tradable property.
So for instance, in Costa Rica, you don't even have water rights, what you have is a license to use. And if you get a license, and you use a certain amount of water, and your license was for more water than what you used, you cannot trade that difference. It's either you use it or you don't use it. And so all of this to say that at the core of this new development is this idea of water rights as property and it's something that we shouldn't naturalize. It's something that we should remember, it's unique to the U.S. context, and a couple other countries in the world, Australia has had something similar, Chile in South America has had something similar, but the rest of the world doesn't think that it is a good idea to trade water rights as if it were your personal property. So just to remind us, that something that is happening here in the US, it's unique to its context, it's not necessarily what is happening in the rest of the world. And for that reason, we shouldn't naturalize it as a global condition. Second, these developments are described as a way to make water use more efficient in locations where the resource is scarce. And what is another element here is that these mechanisms are proposed as the most efficient and the most powerful ways to do this organizing of water users and existing water quantities, as opposed to any other form that exists in these areas, particularly in California, Southern California, for the most part. And here we have evidence from the social sciences from California itself, but also for many other parts of the world, about the ways in which there are forms of organizing water use that are efficient, that are sustainable, and that don't necessarily rely on financial profits as their motivating factor. So as you might already begin to hear, my position is that we don't need these kinds of mechanisms. We know what happens when financial profit is the engine that moves investment, we saw it in 2008. We just saw it here in Texas, during the arctic blast when power was lost by most of the state because there was no regulation about the way in which energy or electricity was being produced, generators were unregulated, and so the distribution of power in an emergency situation, of course, did not fulfill the promise of market-based allocation, or the promise that the surge for profit will result in investments that secure our infrastructures against disaster catastrophe, which we're going to see much more of in the era of climate change.
So it's expectable, what's going to happen, financial investors that have enough resources will put money into these water futures and at the moment in which farmers need this water a year from now, or five years from now, the price is going to be such that is going to be extremely high. And this volatility, although they claim that the mechanism reduces volatility, that this encounter with the results of heavy investment by financial actors, I do not think that will result in more sustainable use of water. I think that, on the contrary, they will result in a shorter assessment of returns, shorter in terms of time, or a short-term assessment of returns, which might end up generating more water use rather than conservation. So, I don't think the financial market is the best mechanism to move us towards a more sustainable use of water resources, particularly in the era of climate change.
Ayana Young Yeah and I'm thinking into the future of water, for many, the mind immediately goes to potential water wars, intense government regulation, or a sort of every person for themselves approach to resources...And, I don’t think we can blame folks for responding in that way because we’ve seen periods of intense drought in our lifetimes, we are flooded with images of scarcity, we know that two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to face water shortages by 2025, and places are moving into periods of rising heat, displaced groundwater, and drying rivers...But we also know that crisis language is born from the colonial tongue, and in your book you write; “Apocalyptic thinking highlights temporal disorientation, but not in relation to a lost future as one might think. Instead, it signals a “hyperbolic anxiety that the future may now be unattainable because the present fails to bring the past to utopic completion.The apocalyptic instills a sense of end of times that depends on the existence of a previous definition of what is or should have been in the future. It depends on an implicit certainty about the existence of some vision from the past that has ended, that will not become.” Why do we need to problematize our tendency towards a water-war-defined future?
Andrea Ballestero I feel very alienated from the war language and there are intellectual reasons and there are personal reasons, I come from a country that does not have an army. And so, war is not a condition that was instilled in us as citizens, as a condition of, of the modern nation-state. Not to say that I am not aware and that we were not in touch with the horrible consequences of war in the Central American region. Of course, we were. But this idea that war is an option, war is one strategy to deal with a particular situation is non-existent for us in Costa Rica as a valid strategy just because we just do not have an army. And it's, it's really interesting what that does to your thinking, as you observed the ubiquity of the world language in other parts of the world. So the world language reproduces a patriarchal, domineering mode of thinking, as you said, it comes from the colonial tongue. And one of the outcomes of war is always death, annihilation, and destruction. There might be other things, but there's, that is always part of it. And I don't see that language, a language that emphasizes destruction is one that can inspire and enable the construction of worlds that are more capable of fostering what in Latin America, many groups, Indigenous, African diaspora, and others are calling buen vivir, or living well, or I don't see the war language as something that is capable of fostering good relations with the land and with others, as Indigenous peoples in North America have taught us.
So this is not a naive proclamation from me, I understand that as I said earlier when you face the practicalities of making different worlds come alive, it's not all good and nice, there are losses, there is suffering, there is dispossession. And so it's not a naive vision of a world where we're all happy and harmonious. On the contrary, it is a realistic orientation, towards what we need to preserve worlds and create worlds in which destruction and annihilation are not the orienting set of values. The language of war, it also activates, what one could call the war industrial complex, right? The language of war immediately activates certain kinds of imaginaries. So who are the players? What are the solutions? And what are the scales at which this work needs to be done, you can fill in the blanks there so I don't go on for too long in terms of who populates each of those categories. So I think that I would leave the war language aside, I am not scared of the notion that we have problems and dispossession and conflicts that we need to deal with, the language of injustice is much more enabling for me as a way to mobilize energy, knowledge, and resources to try to address the problems that we're facing. But I don't I don't think the war language does very much for us, except for putting us again, in a path that we haven't been in before. You can think of all the words that have been fought against so many things between nation-states, in the U.S. against poverty, drugs, etc. And, and I don't think that the outcomes of those “wars”, those outcomes don't convince me that framing is necessarily one that will get us where we need to be. And I actually would invite all of us to remove that language from our vocabulary to not create a shortcut by referring to wars and instead think what is it that we mean by war? Do we mean chaos? Or do we mean exacerbation of inequality? Or do we mean a hoarding by large corporate actors of water? What is it specifically, that we mean, and then mobilize the ideas and the energy and the resistance to prevent those things from happening?
Ayana Young Thank you for that that was really relieving to hear and definitely settled my heart and although I have so many questions, and so, so much that I want to continue to ask you, I will close us out with one last question. Now, you emphasize that the work of the anthropologist is to look at local examples, and I do think a more localized approach is being taken whether that is with wastewater recycling, aquifer recharge, or desalination, and that’s not to say that any of these so-called “solutions” are without consequence, but I wonder, based on your research in Brazil and Costa Rica, what type of organization and forms of water management might lead us to more just and equal outcomes?
Andrea Ballestero Yeah, great question. I will begin by maybe sharing how I understand the local. If you think about the book, in the book, I tried to put side by side things that were happening at two local spaces, or two kinds of local spaces, one, community organizations or small-town public hearings, or those things that fit more with the idea that we have of the local, but at the same time, another local for me, are the regulatory agencies, or Congress, specific Congress representatives, or groups of consultants in Brazil. And the reason I mentioned this is that I think it's really important for us to realize that they're only locals in a certain way, right? We tend to think about the local versus the global or maybe the local versus the state, but there are people and institutions and offices in the state that turn the state also into a local question. And so for me, thinking about the local across those levels, or to put it differently, specifying the people and places, when you're thinking at all scales, it's really important analytic move. And it's also politically a really important way to organize your mobilization or your intervention or the ways in which you want to identify interlocutors.
So with that in mind, I think that we need all kinds of organizations. And I hope that your listeners don't take this as a cop out response, but what I mean to say is that if we consider this idea of the local, and how the local could be a small town, with, say, 5000 residents that live next to forest reserve, the local is also 4.5 million inhabitants in Houston, that lost water at different times during the arctic blast here in the city. Like that's also local. So let me just say that I think that we need public utilities, I think that we need community aqueduct associations, I think that we need sovereign Indigenous nations dealing with their water, I think that in some cases, we even need some private companies that are participating in this question of how to move, distribute, and also protect water both in forests but also in urban spaces.
What I think that we need to put side by side with the question of the type of organization is the question of the principles that organizations follow. And probably you see here that I'm, there's a certain pattern in the way in which I think about this, so a good starting point for those principles, which needs to be translated into concrete decisions. Every day are the principles that are behind the human right to water are these organizations working towards sufficient water, towards safe water, towards acceptable water, and acceptable both culturally and biologically. So it's basically accessible water and towards affordable water. But these principles, which I believe in, I also understand that they come from one very specific way of seeing the world, which is what we call the liberal modern paradigm. And this is the idea that we are all equal subjects that come that the humans are equal subjects, subjects that come together to live in society in a nation-state that has a certain understanding of rights and responsibilities. So that's the baggage so to speak, that the idea of human rights carries. But these principles are not enough, nor are they the only principles that exist in the world. There are many principles that exist outside the liberal modern paradigm. I talked, I mentioned very briefly their principles of good relations and responsibility, the principles of buen vivir, but also we can think of principles of anticapitalist, wealth generation and distribution, or principles of anti-racist ways of organizing collective life.
And so what I would do is think about the different forms that exist, where we are in our locations or locations, being in a particular neighborhood, or a state agency, or our rural community, and think, what principles are guiding the work that these organizations are doing? And how could those principles, how are they translated into very technical and concrete decisions? Such as, am I going to shut off the water main, when somebody has been unable to pay their bill or not? Or am I going to shut off the water source, and guarantee that there's enough drinking water if I detect lead in that water, as in Flint, Michigan, so you can think of all of these principles and ask of the organizational forms that already exist, whether and how they are following them? And the next question is, how to have the imagination and the courage to make sure that those translations are happening, that those principles are being translated into everyday decisions. And if necessary, change your organizational form, so that they can be trusted.
So it would be hard to identify just one organizational form, so maybe one way in which we can tackle this problem is to think about the ecology of organizational forums, and ask what are the principles that are guiding their operations? And what principles should guide their operations, as they are translated into very concrete material and technical decisions? So not only the proclamation of intention but how are these principles translated into very concrete and everyday practical things.
Ayana Young The hail is really coming down as we close this interview, it’s kind of incredible as we're talking about water and different forms of water and here we are just being surrounded by it. But Andrea, this has been such a deeply, beyond interesting, it's really necessary for us because we all depend on water. And we are part of this global collective and so I appreciate so much the depth of your work and your research and your commitment to this topic. So thank you so much for being on the show.
Andrea Ballestero Thank you so much, Ayana. I have really enjoyed it. And I'm available if anybody wants to get in touch. One thing that I would like to say is, it was important for me when I wrote this book to make it as available and accessible to as many people as possible. So with support from our library here at Rice University where I'm working, we made it open access. So you can download the book for free if you're curious to learn more details about any of the issues that I mentioned, and you thank you so much for this podcast. It's really outstanding and I love hearing all of the super interesting and inspiring people that you bring into the conversation.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by The Pit-Yak Aiodoi, Palo-Mah, and Jahnavi Veronica. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.