Andrew Biro

Implementing Integrated Water Resources Management: The Importance of Cross-Scale Considerations and Local Conditions in Ontario and Nova Scotia

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) is advocated by international and expert communities as the most viable approach to achieving sustainable freshwater management. Watersheds are often viewed as the preferred management units. There is increasing recognition, however, that socio-political and watershed boundaries do not coincide, and where they are used for management purposes, these boundaries are constructed through processes of political contestation. Key informants from various agencies and sectors associated with water resources management in Ontario (where watershed-based management has been in place for decades), Nova Scotia (currently developing a comprehensive water resources management strategy), and the Government of Canada were interviewed: to explore the links between IWRM and watershed management; barriers to IWRM; elements essential for IWRM to work effectively; the appropriate scale of watershed management units; and the degree of cross-scale interactions between agencies and stakeholders. Four main themes emerged around capacity, coordination and participation, scale of implementation, and education. To achieve IWRM, particular attention must be paid to existing local circumstances and resources, situated within formalized provincial and national frameworks.

Water Politics and the Construction of Scale

Andrew Biro builds on theoretical insights from the political economy of scale and also imperialism to interrogate the politics of water diversification and privatization. Using North America as a case in point, he argues that, contrary to rhetorical claims that water is a “global” problem, water politics operate through a complex interaction of different bioregional and political scales making place-based identities such as the “nation” or the “region” problematic bases for political engagement. He goes on to suggest that those concerned with creating a more sustainable and just social form — perhaps the only “water war” worth engaging — will need to construct new political identities capable of coordinating struggles across these scales.

Water Wars by Other Means: Virtual Water and Global Economic Restructuring

In the mid-1990s, Tony Allan coined the term “virtual water” to describe international grain shipments, arguing that for purposes of economic efficiency and political legitimacy, governments in water-scarce nations would be better served by importing grain and diverting limited domestic water supplies to higher-value purposes than by producing grain. This concept has gained considerable traction in explaining the absence of “water wars,” particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As a prescriptive policy measure, I argue first that the exemplarity of the MENA serves an ideological function, premised on a market environmentalist approach, and framing “water crisis” as a problem of physical scarcity rather than underdevelopment. Historical trends in virtual water imports, as well as the problem of American primacy in virtual water exports, are then used to develop an account of virtual water trade that situates it within the political and economic restructuring associated with US-led globalization.

Environmental prospects in Canada

Non-Canadian readers might know two things about Canada. First, Canada is a climate change laggard: despite a Kyoto commitment to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 6% from 1990 levels, Canadian emissions increased by 26% between 1990 and 2007 – more than the United States and all other developed country Kyoto signatories (Grant et al. 2009). Second, while Canadian politics is often seen as the epitome of boring, a serious political crisis erupted in late 2008, pitting the ruling Conservatives against a centre-left, and green-tinged, opposition. The events leading up to that crisis, and what has happened since, might hold some lessons applicable within and beyond Canada’s borders.

Reading a water menu: Bottled water and the cultivation of taste:

The market for bottled water is growing and increasingly segmented. How do we explain not just the willingness to pay for a substance (water) that is almost free but also the increasing discernment in a drink generally considered tasteless? We argue that bottled water market segmentation is a leading edge of processes of water commodification, associated with the crisis of Fordism and rise of consumerist capitalism, where the assertion of status through commodity consumption is increasingly necessary. The extensive Ray’s & Stark water menu is analyzed to show how the taste for bottled waters is cultivated. In the menu, references to gustatory sensation are limited. Instead, the tastefulness of water inheres in the distance from anthropogenic influence, made visible through scientific (geological) discourses. The tension between the desire to consume unmediated nature and the scientific abstraction necessary to recognize it reveals the social character of the taste for bottled waters. The highly refined sense of taste that the water menu’s readers are presumed to have is a reflection of consumerist capitalism’s distinctive ways of reproducing socio-economic inequality and metabolizing non-human nature.

The Good Life in the Greenhouse? Autonomy, Democracy, and Citizenship in the Anthropocene

I. Climate Catastrophe and the Sustainability Gap Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are currently above 400 ppm, and they are rising at a rate of about 2 ppm per year. A two-degree global temperature increase will be “locked in” unless global greenhouse gas emissions peak and begin declining in the very near future. The global process for dealing with carbon dioxide emissions—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under which the Kyoto Protocol is subsumed—failed to meet 2012 targets and continues to be deadlocked on what to do post-2012, with the most recent agreement to develop an agreement…

SCREENING THE CRISIS

Abstract Is the current economic crisis a turning point, or rather a condition in which indecision is perpetuated? This question is answered through a reading of three recent Hollywood films about the crisis: The Company Men, Margin Call, and Up in the Air. While valorizing resilience in the face of crisis, the films also point to what is lost in the pursuit of resilience, including the capacity to imagine alternatives.

Yes to Scarcity, No to Austerity

of market solutions to market-induced problems and a sketch of how humanity could move toward addressing these problems. The penultimate chapter should be enough to disabuse many activists of any notion that cap-and-trade style policy initiatives have anything to do with maintaining the habitability of this planet, being instead tools for upward wealth redistribution. Similarly, the authors demolish any notion that corporations, notably BP and Wal-Mart, are likely to do anything to forestall environmental calamity (106).

The political ecology of the semi-periphery: Editors' introduction (part 2)*

*The idea for this symposium was first conceived at a meeting of the Globalism Project – a multinational study of “Neo-liberal Globalism and its Challengers” – in early 2002. The symposium itself is the result of a collective effort by members of the Globalism Project and the CNS Toronto editorial group, as well as a few reviewers unaffiliated with either group. Particular thanks are due to Greg Albo, Liette Gilbert, Mike Gismondi, James Goodman, Roger Keil, Stefan Kipfer, Micki Honkanen, Anita Krajnc, Barbara Laurence, and all the contributors.