Stopping the Last Plunder of the Planet with Maude Barlow.
Lifelong water activist Maude Barlow talks about her new book, Earth for Sale, and what we really need to protect the planet.
From carbon offsets to water markets, corporations and financial institutions are devising more ways than ever to profit from our environment — and they’re calling them “green solutions” while they’re at it. In Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet, Food & Water Watch Board Chair and lifelong water activist Maude Barlow illustrates how “market-based solutions” are not only failing to help the planet but, in many cases, actively harming it.
Maude has spent her career fighting to defend humanity’s access to clean water on the world stage and in her home country of Canada. She served as Senior Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign for the UN to recognize water as a human right. Among many other contributions to the global water movement, she founded Blue Planet and the Blue Communities Project, and she has written 21 books educating the public on water issues, politics, and activism.
In Earth For Sale, her latest book, Maude shows how corporations and governments are seizing on market-based solutions to address our intertwined crises of mass biodiversity loss, dwindling water supplies, and climate chaos. Schemes like carbon offsets put a price on protecting nature, and allow it to be bought and sold on the market. The goal of these “solutions” is purportedly to make “going green” profitable. But rather than protect the planet, these schemes have only handed more profit to corporations.
This year, Maude will sit down with Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter for a book talk at Against All Odds: our annual benefit to protect the planet. To celebrate her work, we met with Maude to discuss her new book and what we actually need to protect the planet. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
