Public services

If public services took green issues seriously they could make a huge difference to the environment. But progress is patchy and painfully slow (John Vidal). Environment groups such as Friends of the Earth, Transport 2000 and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which are now deeply engaged in the planning and sustainable development issues, are broadly sympathetic to the problems of local authorities. However local authorities must urgently raise their game on the environment because most of the key indicators are going in the wrong direction. Traffic is getting worse, air pollution is not improving, carbon emissions are increasing, the amount of waste being land filled has only just started to decline, consumption is growing rapidly and national house building strategies are straining the countryside.

Only a decade ago, embedded in the public services modern environmental agenda, most local authorities saw recycling as an expensive option. Since then, central government posed to set local authorities difficult targets under the Landfill Directive to reduce and control waste. Even the most ecologically illiterate local authorities are now engaged in some activity threatened with heavy penalties for not reducing and recycling and coerced by the Dept for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but also encouraged with generous incentives to earn money if they waste less and recycle more.

We must be able to draw on the way a project or service works and apply it elsewhere, adapting and tying them to local needs. There may be pockets of good practice across the country, but unless we learn from these and are able to replicate them, we risk losing the progress innovative projects have made. Given the gaps that still exist between services and service areas, we have to ensure that services are starting to bridge those gaps. There is no such thing as hard to reach groups, just hard to reach services. Accessibility, therefore, is a vital element of truly innovative projects. Services should be driven by the needs of the people using them. Often particularly in large regeneration projects, the objectives, there service model and the whole ethos is based on external targets and decided without spending time in the local community asking them about their needs. Services can be called innovative when they involve the people t hey are there to serve.

Victor Adebowale, Public service awards; Guardian, p. 3, 29 June 2005



If man is in movement
Water is history
If man is a people
Water is the world
If man is alive
Water is life

Jose Manuel Serrat


The Water Manifesto

The heroes of today and tomorrow are not the most competitive, not those who succeed against the odds and conquer greater financial commercial technological and military power than others. The real heroes are those who advance the common good, who help assert the rights of all to life and citizenship. In today’s world systems of regulation crystallize more and more either at the non-national level of multilateral global organizations that are destatized (IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc) or even privatized, or in rarer cases, at the level of supranational state organisations such as the EU. Today new actors fight it out or cooperate mainly over the control of access to the basic resources which condition not only the lives of individuals out also the collective life of various, regional, national and global communities. These basic resources are money, information and water.

The lords of the earth are no longer industrial magnates like the old Rockefellers, Fords, Thyssens and Solvays, nor oil and railway barons. They are on the one hand, Bill Gates, Bertelsmann, Ted Turner and on the other hand financial corporations such as Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and other investment Trust or insurance companies.

If present treads in relation to water continues for the next 25 years the lords of the earth threaten to become lords of water, the most likely and credible candidates being Suer-Lyonaise des Eaux, Virendi (including the Companie Generale des Eaux), United Utilities, Danove, among others. It is necessary to recognize water as a common global heritage of humanity as a source of life and a fundamental resource for sustainable development of the ecosystem Earth. There are more than 1.4 billion people who do not have access to drinking water and more than another 2 billion have no system for domestic sanitation or the purification of waste water. This will raise to 4 billion in the year 2.25 (half the world population). A report in Le monde reveals that IBM pumps 2.7 million square metres of water per annum from the Neo Comian strata beneath the French dept of Essonne (Le monde, 17 Jan 98, p 11). To produce its 64 megabyte microchips the IBM factory needs very pure water such as one finds only in ancient reserves of this kind.

According to environment protection groups the French authorities are so desperate for opportunities of job maintenance or creation that they say and do very little against the powerful private multinationals. IBM competitors tap the same ancient reserves of under ground water, on the pretext of technological program or with pure intention of job creation (another key objective espoused by one and all).

Peterella, R., translated by Patrick Camiller, The Water Manifesto: Arguments for a world water contract; Zed Books, 2001