Blue Gold - World Water Wars (FULL)

[Water Moving]

[Rain]
[Water Dripping]

In 1906 Pablo Valencia dared the journey from Mexico to California in search of gold.

He survived without water for a week.

7 Days

He was rescued and documented the experience of thirst.

Saliva becomes thick...

a lump seems to form in the throat...

the tongue swells so large that it squeezes past the jaws.

The throat so swollen that breathing becomes difficult,

creating a terrifying sense of drowning.

The face feels full, due to the shrinking of the skin.

Many people begin to hallucinate.

The eyelids crack and the eyeballs begin to weep tears of blood.

When Pablo Valencia was found,

his skin was like purplish-grey leather, scratched but with no traces of blood.

His lips had disappeared, as if amputated...

his nose, withered to half its length...

his eyes trapped in a winkless stare.

This is not a film about saving the environment,

its a film about saving ourselves.

Because whatever one's environmental, political, or religious opinions,

whatever one's race, sex, or economic standing,

whomever of us goes without water for a week,

cries blood.

[Thunder]

There is always a lot of focus on: “well, what's the environmental impact?”

And that's a perfectly valid issue and concern.

The abuse of water and the taking of access of water,

diminishing flows and levels can destroy the sustainability of ecosystems.

But we can't in the name of preventing environmental impacts, there's a mentality that says,

“well as long as we're not causing any significant impacts, we should be able to use the water any way we want”

including selling it, exporting it, for private gain of the few.

When all is said and done, people need water to survive.

That's what the bottom line is.

When we search the universe for life,

we search for water.

Because it is only from liquid water that all known forms of life exist.

The blue planet.

The only planet known to harbor life.

The only planet known to be flowing with water.

Water management has always been of key importance to humans.

The Egyptians depended entirely upon the Nile.

The Romans expanded the boundaries of engineering to use gravity to bring water to their cities.

Ancient societies cherished water,

molded their lives around it,

and even worshiped it

as a god.

For whatever reason between 800 and 1000 AD,

climate change dried up most of the Mayans' local water supply.

Farmers were forced to extend their agriculture into the jungle forest to grow food.

There was not enough water for both the crops and trees,

so the forests died.

The soil eroded...

air humidity decreased...

food decreased.

Mayan leaders prayed to the god of rain,

but the regular rain season brought little water.

The hydrologic cycle was damaged.

Life in the cities became less civilized, as the main focus of Mayan life became providing food and water.

People abandoned the cities to begin a new life in the forests.

In hopes that there was still a sustainable watershed there.

There wasn't.

But as we enter a new era, combining high technology with the demands of global economic trade,

we are entering into a unique stage of history.

"Water, which is the source of life itself, instead of being common and universal to everybody,

because we all depend on it,

profit is made out of the running of and the delivery of water to people and to communities.

Those that have the ability to pay will have access to the water.

Those who do not have the ability to pay, will go without and therefore it is a life and death situation,

a final analysis on the basis of profit."

[Birds Chirping]

[Music]
[Singing]

“Thank you very much, its a great honor to be on this stage with you.

I want to talk comrades and friends about a global water crisis,

in which we know that the world is actually running out of water.”

And that wasn't supposed to happen,

it wasn't supposed to be able to happen because we were all taught,

back in, I don't know, grade 3 or grade 6 or whatever... that there's a cycle.

When it rains, the water falls from the clouds, down all the way to the ground.

It soaks into the ground and then the grass and trees grow.

Sometimes there's so much water underground that lakes and rivers pop up,

like when you squeeze a box of apple juice.

The rivers carry the water back to the ocean.

Inside the ocean, the water floats up to the sky as clouds again.

Then, the wind pushes the clouds towards the land and it rains again.

This all happens over and over, forever and ever.

[Narrator]
How is our water being polluted?

Agriculture uses chemicals to increase farming productivity.

Ironically, implemented to counter a diminishing water supply,

these chemicals pollute the ground water.

Automobile gas emissions pollute the clouds,

but perhaps the most damaging culprit is industry.

Water pollution has been linked to the rising miscarriage rates in women,

lower sperm counts in men.

And it is so globally severe that the Malaysian government proposed the death penalty for anyone caught contaminating water.

This is the most polluted river in the United States.

There's active Polio, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis.

We try and reason with the aliens and tell them what's in the water and try and get them out.

None of the agents are going to get in that water to get any of the aliens.

They are just contaminated.

We have a gate that we deploy across the river down a ways a little bit.

We'll deploy that gate and then they'll all pretty much go back into Mexico.

We already have a battery of shots we take here at local hospital.

It's about 18 different shots for if any agent falls into that water

to keep them from contracting something.

What we saw today was a river of human sewage.

The water smells like nothing you could ever imagine, as much as 25,000 liters per second flow.

It goes into the northeast where people grow crops that later on are sold in the Mexico City market,

so we're being poisoned.

Our waste water is returning to us in the form of food.

When you look into the rivers you can see bubbles, that means that the rivers are losing oxygen.

Contamination and pollution of the water systems is creating Cholera

and water diseases are killing more children today than Malaria or AIDS, or even wars themselves.

The wetlands would normally have been a process whereby there would have been some cleansing of that taking place.

It goes through the wetlands and comes out more purified into the river systems, et-cetera.

But what happens when the wetlands are destroyed?

Where we poison the certain amount of water that can never really be fully recycled?

What we now know is that we are polluting and depleting this finite stock of fresh water so fast,

that we're now mining the ground water faster than it can be replenished.

It rains.

The water hits the ground and percolates into the soil, collecting underground into what are known as aquifers, or ground water.

But how much of our finite supply of water is underground?

We can only estimate, as there is no reliable method to accurately measure it,

which is why our growing dependency on ground water is such an urgent concern.

The fabled Atlantis in the middle east had a real city attached to it.

It was called Ubar.

It disappeared and no one could figure out what happened.

Then some archaeologists found it and what they realized is, it collapsed in the dessert sand from ground water pumping.

Not only could it happen; it is happening today in Florida.

Giant sinkholes have merged, all of a sudden just big cavities on the ground, opening up.

The effects are not always evident as with a sinkhole or lost city.

Entire regions can slowly and evenly sink as a watershed is depleted.

A perfect example is where Mexico city is now.

It was once an oasis of water.

When the Spanish came, they didn't want their new city to look like Venice, they wanted it to look like Madrid.

And they used slave labor to cut down all the trees that would protect the water sources and to trench the water systems.

And what happened was that they just destroyed the water table.

Of course, that was one thing when they were 10,000 people living there,

it's another one when there are, what, 25 million, they've taken the rest of the water underneath the city.

The city is literally sinking in on itself, and these great big churches are beginning to, you know, go sideways.

Mexico is having to go further and further and further away from its local water sources,

because there aren't any left, to find water.

Human ingenuity has found out ways to get water from beneath the surface of the earth for thousands of years.

What's changed, though, is technology. we now pump approximately 30 billion gallons of ground water every day.

The farming community started tapping into our aquifers at the time when there were really not other demands on the resource.

The way that the law works is that they're allowed to use limitless qualities, and then the added kicker is that the law said,

"if you don't use it,if you don't defer all of this water, you may lose your water right."

So, with that scenario, it doesn't encourage conservation of water.

I mean why am I going to go ahead and quit pumping to save water and lose everything?

So then, a guy like me who may want to quit pumping, to quit depleting the aquifer, I have to keep pumping in order to keep my water rights.

When we pump water for such irrigation, some of it percolates back into the ground which is called recharge or return flows.

So long as we pump no more then water is recharged, we are using the ground water sustainably.

The problem is that we are pumping up to fifteen times more water from the ground than is returning back into it, creating a global crisis.

One thing that most people don't know is that the world is desertifying very quickly.

We are becoming a desert in many places.

Our soil is eroding, simply meaning that overgrazing, winds and flooding damage the top layer of earth,

essentially hardening it to the point that rainwater can't easily soak into the ground.

Our life source literally slips away from us back into the ocean through sewers and rivers,

draining the land of its moisture and life.

Extreme weather, a world of hurricanes and violent storms over the ocean while the interior land receives less and less rain, or violent harsh storms that simply erode the land more.

Deforestation is a major contributor to soil erosion.

Tree roots absorb water and, thus, hold the watershed in place.

When they leave the land, so does the water.

Because the forests that hold the water have all been logged, there is no place where the water can be stored.

The rain still comes and runs away as instant surface runoff.