Banda’s organization, Freshwater Project, is an indigenous NGO that works at the grassroots level with communities in Malawi to make clean freshwater and sanitation available to community members. Banda says that this, more than anything else, stabilizes a community and allows the community to make gains in health, education, women’s equality, food security and ultimately development (the main topics covered under the Millennium Development Goals).

Hart spent months in Malawi documenting what life is like for those with and without access to water. Once people have access to a well and a toilet their lives improve drastically, especially so for women. In Malawi women and girls are typically responsible for bringing water to the household, a task that can sometimes take an hour per trip, for as many as 10 trips each day. Many women make these trips in the dark and are subject to sexual harassment and rape. They typically spend so much time finding water that many women are unable to spend much time with their families and as they grow older, many girls no longer have time to go to school.

Lack of sanitation is another reason many girls stop going to school. With no toilet facilities, when many girls reach puberty they have no privacy for dealing with personal hygiene, including menstrual needs, and often choose to stop their education altogether. This is unfortunate, according to Banda because, in Malawi uneducated women typically have five times as many children as educated women do. Banda said that educated Malawian women generally feel more of a sense of control over their lives.

I always knew that there was a connection between lack of water and women’s equality, but Hart’s film really solidified my understanding of exactly how it is played out. Banda said that because so many farmers throughout the world are women (in Sub-Saharan Africa it’s as much as 90% whereas in the United States it’s only 30%), access to water is really a gender equity issue. As residents of a country with ready access to taps and toilets, it’s easy to take water for granted and not draw those connections.

Hart and Banda effectively demonstrate how fundamental access to water and sanitation are to the stability and security of a community (as well as a country). Reasons for war can be complex, to be sure, but overlay a map of global areas of conflict with areas of water scarcity and a strong correlation becomes apparent.  Most U.S. foreign aid goes to war efforts. Now, imagine how much more stability and national security we could achieve if we actually gave people water and sanitation instead of guns.

I saw the film at a screening with follow-on discussion at the Park Slope Food Coop. Joining the discussion were director, Alan Snitow, via Skype, and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, via webcam. Duhigg has been reporting the Toxic Waters series of articles for the Times, examining in-depth the causes of America’s worsening water pollution and the regulatory response.

Initially the group focused on water quantity and quality, including a discussion about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, which opponents believe threatens New York City’s drinking water supply, and wells and groundwater throughout the region. The discussion made its way to ownership of water and current pricing structures.

Those who spoke felt very strongly that water is not a commodity to be sold and that it belongs to all people. They indicated a desire for water to be delivered at low or no cost to communities, with some understanding that treating and transporting water costs money. One Coop member offered management of the Food Coop as a model of management that should be followed for water management. I realized that those present didn’t understand how water is priced, and weren’t aware that they don’t pay for water – but rather for infrastructure.

Coop members pay for all costs associated with housing and distributing their food. They also pay for the food itself, at cost plus a set markup. Similarly, those who are billed for water from a municipal system pay for the treatment and transport of their water; however, they don’t pay for the water itself. Water rates are set by a public utilities commission and are, in theory, determined by what is required to recover capital and maintenance expenditures.

Prior to World War II about half of all U.S. water systems were privately owned. When the Clean Water Act was passed, it was accompanied by funding in the form of government grants that helped offset the costs of many water-related capital projects, increasing the ability of municipalities to upgrade their treatment systems with current technology. As a result, the number of privately-owned water systems decreased to just 15%.  However, the federal share of all clean water spending shrank from a high of 78% in 1978 to just 3% by 2007, a void that has created a market for private water companies to once again fill.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the current condition of America’s water and wastewater infrastructure a grade of D-. While the EPA estimates that the funding gap for water infrastructure is $400 billion, in the United States we spend $12 billion a year on bottled water. Imagine if we spent all that money on supporting the infrastructure that delivers our tap water? Instead, whenever we purchase bottled water we, in essence, take money away from municipal water services.

While we pay an average of two-tenths of a cent per gallon to drink water from the tap in the United States, the average price of a 16-oz. bottle of water is $1.50 – that’s $6 per gallon. In other words, for the same price as that gallon of bottled water, you could get about 3000 gallons of tap water.

In January 2008, members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment wrote a letter to the General Accounting Office asking that it undertake a study identifying appropriate funding mechanisms and revenue sources available to establish a Clean Water Trust Fund. In 2009, Congressman Mark Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced H.R. 3202, the Water Protection and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which would “provide a deficit-neutral, consistent and protected source of revenue to help states replace, repair, and rehabilitate critical drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities.” This type of comprehensive federal funding could take the burden off of consumers and do away with the need for privately-owned water services.

Blumenauer’s reasoning goes like this:

Instead of asking ratepayers to shoulder the full cost of repairing America’s water infrastructure, a steady source of federal funding is needed. Similar dedicated funding is available for our nation’s transportation systems – now it is time to establish a trust fund to finance water infrastructure.

Public control of water utilities is crucial to our ability to face environmental challenges and create sustainable societies. The time to act on this is now, before we are face-to-face with the realities of impending fresh water shortages. It’s time for all of us to get to know our local water utility, to check in with them once in awhile and find out what they’re up to. All of us should know where our water comes from and what problems our local utility is facing. If there is any hint of privatization, learn what you can do to voice your opposition. Food and Water Watch has a strong commitment to keeping our dwindling fresh water supplies public and there are other citizen’s groups that can help you find a voice if your community water supplies are being threatened with privatization. The time to act is before decisions are set in stone.

I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

In reality, nearly every square inch of Central Park was painstakingly landscaped back in the mid-nineteenth century to the specifications of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. A massive public works project, it required some 20,000 workers to subvert existing swamps and blow up bluffs to create a soothing pastoral landscape in the English romantic tradition.

Oh, and there was the little matter of evicting the Irish pig farmers and German gardeners who’d built shantytowns on the land. And destroying Seneca Village, the “first significant community of African American property owners on Manhattan.” The five acre settlement, which included three churches and a school, was seized through eminent domain and demolished.

All this, so that cooped-up city dwellers could get their fix of “nature.” Our civilized way of life is so removed from the natural world that Central Park’s manicured, manipulated acres are as close to a bit of wilderness as we can hope to get within the borough of Manhattan.

But you can catch a glimpse of what Manhattan was really like before we invaded it and tamed it by watching the fascinating video that architect/educator Fritz Haeg’s created in collaboration with the Mannahatta Project. The video documents Haeg’s Lenape Edible Estate installation, which was designed to “provide a view back to the lives of the native Lenape people, how they lived off the land 400 years ago” on the island that was then called Mannahatta.

The Lenape project was installed back in June when Haeg and a team of volunteers descended with shovels and soil on a triangle of uncultivated land in front of a Chelsea housing project to plant the beans, corn, squash, berries, and other edibles that the Lenape tribe lived on centuries ago.

The project offers a “meditation both on the historical facts and the future possibilities for our occupation of the island,” as Haeg notes. He hopes that it “may also serve as a model for modest small scale urban edible landscapes and as a possible prototype for future green spaces on similar housing sites across the city.”

I’m delighted to see Haeg bring his verve and vision to an American urban setting. His U.S. plantings have been primarily in the ‘burbs, as documented in his book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (which also includes an installation at a London housing project). Edible Estates, written in 2007 and published in the winter of 2008, anticipated–and surely helped inspire–the recent kitchen garden renaissance. Haeg’s book sold so well that it’s now out of print.

Happily, a new edition will be released next spring. The new Edible Estates will include more stories of lawn-to-lettuce conversions and an expanded preface from Haeg on how the edible landscape scene has changed since the first edition. Urban ag genius Will Allen’s contributing a piece, and there will be a nod to the White House kitchen garden, whose role in helping to inspire millions of new gardeners this year is indisputable.

As Haeg noted in an op-ed this past spring in The Guardian, the First Family’s 1,100 square foot patch of veggies is “not just a pretty garden, or an empty symbol, but a place for a family to grow the food that they like to eat, on the land that is around them” (that’s why there’s plenty of cilantro and tomatillos, for salsa, but no beets– Obama doesn’t like ‘em). Haeg adds:

Many American children today do not see evidence that food comes out of the ground or experience the pleasure of eating food fresh from plants. Instead their diet is causing epidemic childhood illness. The introduction of a food-producing garden into their early lives is our best hope for changing the situation in a meaningful way.

But there’s another compelling reason to start growing some of your own food, whether it’s in your yard, on a rooftop, or in a window box: it’s one way to help curb your carbon footprint, or, rather, foodprint. No one is seriously suggesting that city dwellers can produce all our own food in our yards, community gardens, or urban farms, but it’s just one of the many steps that we can take to lower our impact.

During World War II, planting a kitchen garden was pitched as our patriotic duty. Isn’t it time we made growing your own food a civic virtue once again? Only this time, the fight is against the fossil- fueled American life that’s given us an increasingly unhealthy populace and an overheated planet.

And we’re in imminent danger of losing that battle. “Current emissions trajectories” are hurtling us towards the point of no return, i.e. “the worst-case scenarios” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the New York Times.

At a daylong conference on climate change held Tuesday at the United Nations, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the world’s leaders that “Science leaves us no space for inaction now.”

This bleak pronouncement comes on the heels of a headline blaring “We’re Screwed” on the front page of Monday’s New York Post–or, rather, a remarkably New York Post-like publication that was passed out to unsuspecting commuters by activists. The hoax was orchestrated by the Yes Men, that pair of pranksters who’ve so masterfully manipulated the mainstream media, as documented in their upcoming film, The Yes Men Fix the World.

It looked an awful lot like the real thing and fooled a lot of folks. But on close inspection, you could tell that it was a fake because, unlike Rupert Murdoch’s publication, “the faux Post is filled with factual information on the threats posed by climate change,” as USA Today observed.

You’d never see an article in the real Post touting the potential of rooftop farming to help curb New York City’s carbon foodprint, or a shout-out to an upcoming presentation hosted by NYU on Food and Climate Change: The Meat of the Matter, that explores the significant contribution that meat and dairy production make to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, Monday’s edition of The Daily News ran an article about the 18,000 pounds of fresh produce that inmates on Rikers Island have grown this year to supply the city’s soup kitchens and food pantries–further proof of the tangible, quantifiable benefits of urban agriculture.

Monday’s Financial Times also echoed the Yes Men’s “We’re Screwed” headline with an article entitled “Scientific Consensus Over Dire Consequences,” which noted that:

The gap between the glacial pace of negotiations and the rapid progress of global warming is now endangering the safety of the planet, scientists are warning. Martin Parry, of Imperial College, London, says: “That is what is at stake. I don’t think people have realised [sic]. We are nowhere near tackling this.”

Can we muster the collective will to alter the way we live in order to avert the worst repercussions of climate change? Those of us who live in densely populated cities already have the advantage of mass transit–and, ironically, greater access through farmers’ markets and CSAs (though not nearly enough in many communities) to the freshly harvested plant-based foods that form the cornerstone of a low-impact diet.

I don’t know if we’ll ever manage to liberate ourselves from the petroleum-based processed foods that currently dominate our food chain. But I’m heartened by the sight of so many New Yorkers attempting to grow food, whether it’s on the roof of a Brooklyn warehouse or the back of a Brooklyn-based pick-up truck, behind the barbed wire of Rikers Island, or in front of a housing project on the island formerly known as Mannahatta. Let freedom spring!

The pork industry’s quaking in its collective manure-encrusted boots over HBO’s upcoming documentary Death On A Factory Farm, set to premiere next Monday, March 16th at 10pm and be repeated numerous times during the month. The documentary follows an animal rights investigator who spent six weeks working undercover at the Wiles Hog Farm in Creston, Ohio and captured repeated instances of extreme cruelty inflicted on the hogs by callous workers.

Folks who tune in to watch will undoubtedly be disturbed by the graphic footage, but they may be equally shocked to learn that most animal cruelty laws don’t extend to farm animals. The film’s co-producer, seven-time Emmy winner Tom Simon, expressed the hope that exposing these particularly egregious instances of animal cruelty would compel the industry to do a better job of policing itself, adding that “if it doesn’t clean up its act, somebody’s going to do it for them.”

“Pete,” the pseudonymous undercover star of Death On A Factory Farm, granted an interview to Time magazine this week in which he talked about what motivates him to do this kind of work despite the toll that being an undercover animal rights investigator has taken on his personal life (question: doesn’t posing for Time’s photographer kinda blow your cover, even with the baseball cap and sunglasses? Just wondering.)

Simon and “Pete” will be guests on Air America’s Break Room Live with Mark Maron and Sam Seder this Friday at 3pm if you’d like to learn more about their campaign to shine a light on some of factory farming’s darkest practices.

Take Out, the new film by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou about an illegal Chinese immigrant scrambling to pay off his debt to the people who helped smuggle him into the US with tips from his delivery job, has extended its stay at Quad Cinemas after selling out last weekend.

The film opened to rave reviews from the Voice and the Times, but the most edu-taining take on Take Out comes from our friend Kerry Trueman at Eating Liberally.

As a former waitress and bartender (though one who’s biggest scramble was to make rent) I can’t wait to see this film, and I am to am loving all those “I’ll never tip poorly again!” reviews. Too often, laborers, from the ones who plant and harvest the veggies to the ones who plop your plate down, take a back seat to other aspects of sustainable food production. Tipping the take-out guy is a start, but to learn more about labor issues and immigration issues, check out the United Food and Commercial Workers’ International Union (UFCW), the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW) and The Migrant Project.

We hear the film was shot on a budget of a few thousand dollars, so here’s to scrappy filmmakers serving up food for thought about social justice issues!