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WHO WILL OWN THE EARTH?

Two Paths to Our Future

IN THE TINY TOWN OF CIBOLA, Arizona, home to three hundred people, a firm called Greenstone—a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the financial conglomerate MassMutual—quietly bought the rights to nearly all the town’s water. Greenstone set out to sell that water to the highest bidder, shifting it away from the vital living use of agriculture and selling it to the Phoenix suburb of Queen Creek for purposes like filling backyard pools. As county supervisor Holly Irwin told a reporter, “They’re going to make big bucks off the water, and who’s going to suffer? It’s the rural counties going up against big money.”¹

Not far away, in Colorado, the hedge fund Water Asset Management (WAM) has become one of the largest landholders in the Grand Valley west of Denver as a way of advancing its strategy of collecting water rights. The hedge fund is following this strategy at the same time the region is undertaking a review of how to manage the water of the Colorado River, now threatened by drought, with flows shrunken by 20 percent in twenty years. For the last century, management of the river’s waters has been overseen by the Colorado River Compact, a government framework with its attendant slow-moving, democratic process of settling conflicts, struggling toward consensus and shared sacrifice through community and government negotiation.²

Will democracy remain in control? Or will the end run of fast-moving, aggressive capital turn our precious, diminishing water into a new object for financial extraction?

Who will own the water of the earth? Who should own and control the water systems of our communities? Whom do we trust to be in control in the world of ecological crises we’re coming to live within?

With the advance of climate change, some of the most immediately catastrophic impacts are hitting fresh water, now seeing growing shortages sure to accelerate. In 2022, the water system of Jackson, Mississippi—the state’s capital and largest city—utterly collapsed, leaving many homes with no running water.³ Numberless catastrophes like these lie ahead as we move into a dramatically different future for fresh water than the stable world we’ve long known, as rising temperatures, drought, and torrential rains disrupt traditional levels and flows of this resource that every living being daily requires. The United Nations World Water Development Report projects that by 2050, some 6 billion people—more than half the global population—will suffer clean water scarcity.⁴

Business understands this frighteningly well. In May 2000 Fortune magazine observed: “Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century: the precious commodity that determines the wealth of nations.”⁵

This awareness has spurred the new wave of capture sweeping the American West, from the Rockies to Southern California, as investors like Greenstone search out and buy up precious water rights. In the eyes of big capital, water is an “undervalued asset.”

Big capital doesn’t ask who should own water. Finance functions today as a colonizing force, and the colonizer seeks to own everything. Capital’s aim is to possess water as a new “asset class” it can monetize in the face of looming shortages. Matthew Diserio, WAM’s cofounder and president, is frank about the ambition at work—though he speaks of it in the cloaked, technical language of finance. Water in the US is “the biggest emerging market on earth,” he says. It’s “a trillion-dollar market opportunity.”⁶

Water as the Common Property of All

It is from the standpoint of the colonized that decolonization begins, wrote Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth. It begins with the impassioned claim that our needs and our view of the world are fundamentally different from that of the colonizer.⁷ Water is a global commons, “the common property of all,” says longtime water activist Maude Barlow. “Water belongs to the earth and all species.” Access to clean, affordable water is a fundamental human right, she says, echoing the 2010 United Nations declaration that water is a human right essential to all human rights.⁸ No one has the right to appropriate water for profit, Barlow maintains. “Water must be declared a public trust.”⁹

It’s remarkable how instinctively communities agree with this view. Even more remarkable is the fact of who actually owns the water systems of the US today: we do. Some 85 percent of Americans get their water from a local, publicly owned utility. Polls and referenda show we want to keep it that way.¹⁰

In the words of Arizona assemblywoman Regina Cobb, who represents Cibola, capital is trying to make water a commodity, but “that’s not what water is meant to be.”¹¹ There are towns—desperate for the income and investment—that have privatized their water systems, turning management or sometimes outright ownership of these systems over to private corporations. But often voters reject this approach. In places like Trenton, New Jersey, Baltimore, and Edison, New Jersey, voters massively rejected water privatization, with more than 75 percent voting against it.¹² Similarly in the UK, as Mary Grant of Food & Water Watch put it, “People feel deeply connected to water and that it needs to be in public and local control.”¹³

Pause again to consider the fact that close to 85 percent of Americans get their water from a local, democratically owned and controlled utility. The largest is the municipally owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves 4 million residents and businesses. This is a democratic economy already in operation. We the people right now own and control the water systems of American communities. And we are apparently enjoying superior service as a result, if the measure of success is something other than maximum profit for investors. While conclusive data isn’t available, my former Democracy Collaborative colleague Thomas Hanna, who’s now with the philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures, in a study found that privately owned water utilities in the US often charge consumers higher prices. He also cited concerns that private operators perform poorly and that their management leaves citizens uneasy with the lack of local, direct accountability.¹⁴

The Rising Wave of a Movement

Imagine you and I one day find ourselves in the position of those folks in Jackson, with no running water coming out of our taps. Who do we want to be calling? Massive absentee corporations with their robo-answering systems (staffed by hard-to-reach humans possibly in Delhi), or local managers accountable to the mayor and city council? Do we want to be paying reasonable or soaring rates?

In the UK since 1989, following privatization of water, water bills for customers climbed by one third. The water industry now boasts 32 percent profit margins. As private water companies paid out £72 billion in dividends to shareholders, sewage leaks fueled public rage. In the service area of the privately owned Thames Water, so much sewage built up in the River Thames that residents of Little Marlow started calling their part of the river “crappuccino.” Sewage gushed into apartment windows in London. As activist organizations formed, the UK in recent times has seen the largest wave of protests since water was privatized three decades ago.¹⁵

The US is also seeing a rising number of antiprivatization organizations, with the growth of such groups as Friends of Locally Owned Water, Our Water Campaign, and Public Water Now. One crowd-sourced study by the Transnational Institute and researchers at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) found seventy-two cases over the last two decades where water service in the US was returned to public ownership and control. Behind these shifts are often impassioned local campaigns. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, an antiprivatization campaign in 2017 was backed not only by a strong local alliance but also by forty state and national groups, including the NAACP, ACLU New Jersey, and the New Jersey AFL-CIO.¹⁶

Globally, a movement to reassert democratic control of water has enjoyed three hundred successful cases of remunicipalized water since 2000. One of the most delightful is in Paris, where the newly public water system installed water fountains around the city that dispensed carbonated water—“socialism with a sparkle,” as Cat Hobbs with We Own It put it.¹⁷

This movement for local ownership and control of water is directly counter to the neoliberal revolution of Margaret Thatcher, who not only privatized the UK’s water but also sold off gas and electric utilities, rail and bus lines, seaports, and airlines. In the process, she inadvertently demonstrated the superiority of local, democratic control of water—and by contrast, the debacle that results when private, profit-maximizing ownership moves in.

Still, big capital is out there on the move, backed by tens of billions in institutional investor capital, with many communities desperate for funding to upgrade aging infrastructure.

Which view will prevail? Water as a human right, a global commons? Or water as a trillion-dollar market opportunity?