I first started to think about the socio-environmental problems of dams in 2005 when, in my first year of college majoring in environmental studies, I wrote a paper about the impact of hydro dams on the salmon population in the US state of Oregon (where I lived during my teen years). My research for the paper helped to set me on the path of showing me that my gut was correct: all injustice is interconnected, which means that the exploitation of people cannot be treated as a separate reality from the exploitation of the environment. I first learned about the problem of corporations bottling water and then selling it for a profit in 2008 during a study abroad program in Brazil. I visited the Tucuruí hydroelectric dam in the state of Pará; I saw some of the environmental and social devastation caused by mining and dams. When I came back to the United States, I continued organizing on my campus and in the community around a variety of social and environmental problems. In truth, I felt disempowered in the face of the harm caused by US based corporations, and the ongoing imperialist bloodthirst of my own country. And so, I turned my energy more local: after college, I worked as a community organizer in Jacksonville, Florida for four years on social justice issues not directly connected to water. This work affirmed my belief in the power of people organizing for change, and the capacity to create a different world. These experiences alongside others also showed me that while work at the local level is critical, it must be connected to the global. This is how we build the needed collective power to resist oppressive systems and construct a different world. Following a MA in Latin American studies at the University of Florida, in 2015 I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to start my PhD. The next year the Pittsburgh level of lead in the water crisis broke. I felt personally connected to it (my own house tested at 100 ppb lead level, well above the Environmental Protection Agency limit of 15ppb), and I felt convinced that I had a responsibility to fight for clean, safe, public water in my present home in Pittsburgh.
Global Solidarities Against Water Grabbing: Without Water, We Have Nothing is about how conflicts over water are human-caused events that have socio-political and economic roots. The idea of water as a right, a public good, and a commons—versus a commodity, privately controlled and sold at high prices—is at the center of this debate. The book examines how movements are communicating and organizing around water and other fundamental rights. It also explores how movements engage with and learn from each other. The arguments are built on three case studies, carried out between 2016 and 2022. The first one was conducted with the Our Water Campaign (OWC), a coalition based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. The second is with Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of People Affected by Dams or MAB), a national, autonomous popular social movement. Nigeria’s Our Water, Our Right (OWOR) is a third example that bridges the two primary cases. Global Solidarities Against Water Grabbing uses ethnographic, autoethnographic, comparative, and feminist and anti-colonial methods to show how global communications and organizing are occurring around water and how Global North movements are engaging with and learning from the Global South and vice versa.
The book explores how capitalist exploitation and appropriation are being contested, how movements are proposing alternatives beyond capitalism, and the multi-scalar (translocal) dimensions of social movements. As I write in the book, “right to water movements are about more than water and are examples of challenging hegemonic thinking. Just as transnational corporations work globally, movements resisting privatization do the same: their struggles are locally focused, and organizing occurs at the local level, but these struggles are linked to more extensive national and global processes. Translocal activism is about people engaging with the state and markets, and fighting for participatory, democratic, and more horizontal governance structures, as well as the ideas of more communal notions of property rights, rights to livelihood, and social justice (Banerjee, 2018: 812)” (Schroering, 2024: 87-89).
As much as it is about resistance to water grabbing, the book is about resistance to capitalism, imagining new social relations, understanding how power works and operates, and the role of education and organization in building counter-hegemonic movements. In this sense, this book also becomes a portal to understanding how all of these struggles are interconnected. What the term translocal captures is that people understand that their struggle must be rooted in the local, while at the same time understanding that the pressure creating the need for the fight is coming from corporate power that is seeking to exploit communities around the globe, albeit in varying forms. During the earlier days of grad school in particular, I struggled with the tension between being an organizer and militant on one hand and being a scholar on the other. My ongoing work with movements has strengthened my understanding that while there are contradictions between the two, that what ultimately holds true for me, as a sociologist who came into the work because of my own participation in social movements, and whose scholarly work is also with movements, can ultimately be summed up by this statement (the title of an article from 1986) from Florestan Fernandes: “Para o sociólogo, não existe neutralidade possível: o intelectual deve optar entre o compromisso com os exploradores ou com os explorados” (For the sociologist, there is no possible neutrality: the intellectual must choose between a commitment to the exploiters or to the exploited).
The book also has lessons for thinking about how we organize in the face of climate change, which is becoming more urgent by the moment, as the globe is faced by more and more extreme weather events and devastation: some regions will have more water, some less, and we know from history and the present that in moments of crisis, capitalist expansion works to exploit these horrors for financial gain, while doing nothing to address the problem at the core. We cannot cap and trade our way out of the climate crisis. In the book I cite the following by Carmen Gonzalez, who asserts that “the ‘slow violence’ inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism” (2021: 118). This argument shows that the slow violence of extractivism (and I would extend this to thinking about water) must be addressed. Further, to address it, we have to reckon with histories of colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism –and how these systems continue in the present including via forms of neocolonialism, militarization, and market based “solutions” to climate change. Yet, too often when talking about climate change, it is seen as something all of humanity has caused and that affects everyone” (Schroering, 2024: 166-167). This directly relates to the argument that was made in an event about climate justice organized by MAB in Rio in June 2024. As speakers noted there, we need to change this narrative that climate change is something coming. It has already arrived. People have already died due to climate change. And while no part of the world will be unaffected, climate change is also not the end of the world for everyone. The rich can escape it. The poor cannot. Towards the end of the meeting someone said that “we are affected by the model of society”. The economic system we have views most human lives—and other than human lives—as “disposable”. And for me that is a crime.
Organizing and building the world we want becomes more and more urgent with every passing day. Moments of despair are valid; grief and rage are needed. And so too is hope. Hope isn’t naïve; it’s staring at the horrors of the world, of the centuries of colonial and capitalist violence, and saying: it could be different and I have a responsibility to do my part in making it so. Hope is the only option when the going is tough. And we strengthen it by building community and envisioning the world we want, which is more important now than ever. It’s the trap of cultural hegemony to believe this is the best we can have. We cannot create something different if we cannot imagine the possibility of it. This book is about not just how we build hope, but how movements fighting against water grabbing are already cultivating it. It is about how we organize. MAB has a saying that “water, energy, and women are not commodities”— profit should not come before life. And life on this planet depends on us collectively understanding this, and fighting for it. Without water, we have nothing.
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