Multiple films fictionalize the actual water war in documented in Bolivia, where citizens kicked out its private water companies and began a sustainable water plan. For example, Andrew Hageman examines this issue in a dialectical reading of Even the Rain (2010), and Abuela Grillo (2009) (66) that shows parallels between these fictional films and the documentary The Corporation (2003).
This issue is also explored in more detail in the documentary Flow: For Love of Water, which documents the 1999 water privatization in Bolivia forced by the World Bank, which excluded 208,000 people from portable water in Cochabamba. Water was returned to the people of Cochabamba in 2000 and to citizens of La Paz in 2007, according to the film.
Although the Nairobi summit’s solutions are not discussed, and the local solutions seem limited, the multiple problems associated with water rights are revealed and illustrated well in Blue Gold and reinforced by Flow. Contemporary films in a variety of genres reflect the ongoing influence of this doctrine of prior appropriation. Chinatown (1974) most clearly draws on the doctrine, and Quantum of Solace (2008) and Rango (2011) demonstrate the doctrine’s continuing influence.
To move toward a solution to this conflict between profit and need, Blue Gold establishes the problem and supports it with illustrations from around the world. Our water is in crisis, a title card explains, and a World Social Forum in Nairobi is examining the evidence to determine the best ways to ensure water is available and affordable for everyone. According to Maude Barlow, fresh water only comprises three percent of the total water on Earth; yet, most of that is undrinkable because it is polluted by farmers, cars, and industrial wastes that cause miscarriages, low sperm rates, and disease. The Rio Grande River in the United States, for example, is so polluted that anyone entering it would need eighteen vaccines and shots to survive. Around the world, cholera, a water-borne disease, kills more than wars because of this overt pollution, and over 60 percent of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed.
According to the documentary, the water crisis is a product not only of water pollution; however, it also is a repercussion of the mining for water by industry, farming, and the bottled water corporations. The world’s fresh water supply is becoming polluted so fast that corporations are mining it faster than it can be replenished. Individuals, factory owners, and farmers overuse groundwater, sometimes because of the doctrine of prior appropriation that states if farmers or factory owners do not use the water, they may lose their water rights. Urbanization and overdevelopment accelerates groundwater depletion because a paved land devastates the water cycle. Dam projects exacerbate the problem, according to Vandana Shiva, “choking the artery of the planet” and breaking a sustainable water cycle.
To overcome this water crisis, Blue Gold declares that we need to work on a renewable supply and determine how much we really have to work with and live within those limits. The film asserts that water should be a public commons rather than a privatized source of profit, as it is now around the world—with help from big companies such as Veolia, Suez, Vivendi, and Nestle. The last scenes of the film highlight ways to solve this water crisis. A final documentary chapter, “The Way Forward,” introduces multiple examples of local residents usurping the power of these corporate giants. Uruguay rid itself of the Suez Water Treatment Company by changing its constitution. And Fryeburg, Maine poured Nestlé’s bottled water back into its aquifers. The film ends here, but the suggestion is that together, and primarily on a local level, the water crisis can be solved. Although these hopes seem unattainable as climate crises exacerbate droughts, the rhetoric of the film still resonates.
Documentary films such as Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008) begin to elucidate U.S. water rights issues like the appropriative doctrine. In contrast to the Clean Water Act, the appropriative doctrine, “is a queuing system that rewards first movers.” Although those with water rights again hold only usufruct rights, “in this system, the first claimant to a water source has the highest priority to divert water, so long as the withdrawal is for a ‘reasonable and beneficial use’” (Donohew 89). The appropriative water rights doctrine, however, serves as “a basis for water markets. The doctrine allows for water to be claimed, diverted, and separated from land through which water flows. It can be transported out of a basin for use elsewhere.
As such, those who buy water rights or lease water can change the location of diversion, timing of use, and nature and site of ultimate use, subject to regulatory approval to protect downstream claimants” (Donohew 90). Vandana Shiva agrees, arguing “the doctrine of prior appropriation established absolute rights to property, including the right to sell and trade water” (22). Because the appropriative doctrine “gave no preference to riparian landowners,” even those far from water sources could compete for water, a principle that “provided the essential ingredients for an efficient market in water wherein property rights were well-defined, enforced and transferable” (Anderson and Snyder 75).
As the title suggests, Blue Gold: World Water Wars also examines the worldwide consequences of commodifying water and offers grounding for narratives explored in fictional films like Quantum of Solace (2008), released the same year. And Blue Gold defines its purpose and rhetorical approach in its opening claim: “This is not a film about saving the environment. This is a film about saving ourselves,” narrator Malcolm McDowell declares. “Whoever goes without water for a week cries blood.” An historical overview of ancient cultures’ attempts to manage water reinforces the film’s premise. The Egyptians and Romans succeeded, where the Mayans did not because they had too little water, the film argues. Today water is a source of profit for a few but necessary for us all. Negotiating a viable resolution between these two world views serves as an objective for the film.
Ultimately, in A Civil Action Attorney Jan Schlichtmann (John Travolta) and his law firm settle with both Grace and Beatrice, but Schlichtmann also sends his case files to the EPA, including a report from a worker who witnessed the cleanup that proves toxic waste had been dumped in the city’s water supply, and the EPA forces both Grace and Beatrice to pay 69.4 million dollars in cleanup costs because both companies violated the Clean Water Act.
According to a summary of the Clean Water Act from the EPA, “the Clean Water Act (CWA) establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” but not groundwater sources. Based on this 1972 Clean Water Act, the EPA “has implemented pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry” and “set water quality standards for all contaminants in surface waters,” making it illegal to “discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained.”
The Clean Water Act helps control one important element of the riparian doctrine, ensuring that downstream water uses are not adversely affected by those upstream. The Clean Water Act and the EPA monitoring it become integral agents in A Civil Action and the actual court case it inspired.
In A Civil Action (1998), the “reasonable use” of water is under question. The film explores whether or not those who used the same water source as does a leather tanning company were adversely affected by the company’s water use.
Although the film primarily centers on Jan Schlichtmann’s (John Travolta) failed attempts to sue both Beatrice and W.R. Grace, he ultimately proves that the tannery these companies manage dumped silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE), toxic waste that contaminated a town’s water supply and caused multiple cancers in its townspeople.
The film traces attorney Schlichtmann’s investigation into a case that revolves around a woman whose son had died of leukemia two years before, along with more than a dozen other townspeople. The city’s drinking water is blamed, but the townspeople seem unaware of the source of this water pollution.
It is Schlichtmann who discovers a tannery connected with W.R. Grace dumping toxins into the river beside the factory. When he learns representatives of Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace are culpable and have big pockets, a lawsuit begins. Schlichtmann’s investigation is meant to determine that silicone and trichloroethylene (TCE) were dumped into the water supply by the tannery and causing the cancers in townspeople.
Water has been considered a natural right around in the world and treated as a usufructuary right for thousands of years. Such a right gives temporary possession and enjoyment to those who use water, as long as that use does not cause damage or change it. According to this perspective, water can be used but not owned. The Riparian Doctrine clarifies this natural right. As economist Zachary Donohew explains, because water is typically seen as a usufructuary right, rivers and streams cannot be owned but their water can be accessed by those who live and work beside their banks (90).
Although current riparian principles draw on private ownership to define reasonable water use, the doctrine primarily applies to public riparian lands, as activist Vandana Shiva notes in her discussion of communal water use in Colorado’s Rio Grande Valley (27). The Riparian Doctrine still prevails in much of the Eastern United States because water is much more abundant there than in the Western states, but it also serves as a guiding principle for community rights and water democracies in India (Shiva 29), which hold that “Water is a commons…. It cannot be owned as private property and sold as a commodity” (36).
Both fictional features and documentaries with water at their center draw on the tenets of the Riparian Doctrine. Westerns such as The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) emphasize riparian principles, especially in relation to the Desert Land Act, but contemporary feature films also draw on riparian ideals, which, in these cases, are in conflict with the Clean Water Act and its roots in human approaches to ecology.
Water rights also connect explicitly with human approaches to ecology that not only draw on riparian rights and the appropriative doctrine, but also helped to foster the EPA’s Clean Water Act of 1972. For example, Ellen Swallow Richards explains how human approaches to ecology encourage the right to water, explaining “In common law, water is held to be a gift of nature to man for use by all, and therefore not to be diverted from its natural channels for the pleasure or profit of any one to the exclusion of the rest” (Air, Water, and Food 57). But for Richards, it was not enough to ensure water was available. That water must also be clean, asserting, “A city or town is under strict obligation to furnish a safe supply of water as it is to provide safe roads” (59). For Richards, everyone should have access to water free of contaminants or “objectionable substances, mineral and organic” (61) because it is “a necessary condition of life” (67).
Perhaps because water is both abundant and necessary, it serves as a protagonist in films from the silent era to the present. Water rights take different roles in contemporary feature films. Floods take the center in silent films such as Victor Fleming’s When the Clouds Roll By (1919), New Deal features, such as Our Daily Bread (1934), and contemporary features such as Michael Polish’s Northfork (2003). Drought, on the other hand, serves as the protagonist in features from the John Ford epic Grapes of Wrath (1940) and contemporary documentaries, including Jim Burroughs’ Water Wars (2009).
All of these films, however, draw on environmental history and environmental law, paving the way for films that are at least partially based on America’s sometimes conflicting views of water rights, views almost always grounded in the nineteenth-century American drive for progress. Although this connection to environmental law is most explicitly illustrated by the documentary Tapped (2009) and an animated feature, Rango (2010), it reaches the mainstream in more subtle and powerful ways in Quantum of Solace, an unlikely rhetorical film that not only demonstrates the dangers of commodifying water but also offers solutions that look back to earlier historical visions of water as a right.
