Gil Garcetti is known for his starring role as the District Attorney of Los Angeles County during the prosecution of the O.J. Simpson trial, as well as the executive producer for TNT’s hit, The Closer. But what he wants you to know about is his newfound passion, to bring clean water to the people of West Africa.
The Commonwealth Club of California has heeded the environmental call, and has dedicated the month of August to talks on water entitled, Cool Clear Water. The first in the series of talks, Water in the 21st Century, began with Garcetti followed by Dr. Peter Gleick, co-founder and President of the series’ co-sponsor, Pacific Institute, in Oakland. Gleick, an internationally recognized water expert, called a “visionary on the environment” by the BBC, received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work. The Conrad Hilton Foundation, who contributed close to forty million dollars in safe water projects in West Africa (the entire U.S. foreign systems program for water supply and sanitation in all of Africa was about twenty-five million dollars last year), has fully funded the publication of Garcetti’s book entitled, Water is Key. The book is a series of photographs illustrating the impact a safe water source can have on West African communities and shares its pages with poignant essays by some of the world’s top humanitarian leaders: Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (the first woman president in Africa); U.S. President, Jimmy Carter; Ireland President, Mary Robinson; United Nation Secretary-General, Kofi Annan; and African villagers. Garcetti and Gleick will spend the next year touring the country, with all proceeds from the book and photograph prints sales going to their cause.
Garcetti’s first trip to West Africa was in January 2001 to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the poorest nation in the world. What Garcetti witnessed, he said through a slideshow of his photographs, dramatically changed his life.
“The most, perhaps, meaningful thing that I learned, saw, and heard time and again was that over 70 percent of the people in these nations do not have safe water. There are consequences to not having safe water. Some of them are obvious: health problems, real health problems, continuous health problems, high infant mortality, certainly because the water, diarrhea, we can go on and on with this. Women are affected, girls are affected. Girls have to fetch the water, everyday, seven days a week. So girls don’t go to school. [When] girls don’t go to school, everyone suffers.”
In his photographer’s statement, which accompanies his black and white prints where 100 percent of the proceeds go to water projects led by NGOs in Africa, he writes,
“I also saw a practical reason to be involved in West Africa. Given the political times, I concluded that we need to be seen in the non-Christian world as truly carrying about these West African countries—Muslim countries.”
Garcetti also emphasized that it was due to the strength of the women in the villages that these water projects in West Africa were able to succeed. Most of the men have left to find work.
Garcetti explains: I was with a Peace Corps volunteer going into a village and I was looking for this woman in this little house. This is a huge village with 4,000 people. Sure enough, everyone knew her. I interviewed her and I said, “Tell me about your micro credit loaning. What is it?”
She said, “We sell goats.”
I said, “Oh, how long have you been doing it?”
“About six years.”
I said, “Oh, all right. Has it been successful?”
“Yeah, forty-one loans we’ve been doing.”
And I said, “How many animals are you selling?”
“Almost 6,000.”
“6,000! That’s a lot of money!”
She said, “Yes.”
“What do you do with all that money?”
“We built a school because in our community, when kids go to school, they have to wear the uniforms but families can’t afford the uniforms. We provide the uniforms. We keep money for emergencies. And we buy grains for when we run out of our food.”
That’s what it’s all about. I also said, “When you come back from selling, does your husband see that you sold something? Doesn’t he say, ‘Hey honey, can I get a beer tonight?’ And she said, ‘Yes, exactly. We give them a coin for one beer.’”
Photographs of clean water projects and the joy that comes with them fill the book, with the idea that with these hopeful images, Western countries and their citizens will step up.
“This is a photograph, for me, of hope and of optimism,” Garcetti says. “The hands you see are the hands of the chief of this village. You can see how incredibly dry they are. But they’re clean. They’re manicured and they’re taken care of. But the little feet are his grandson’s. An image about his hope and his hope for his grandson. And each of us can help.”
Dr. Peter Gleick’s extensive work with water followed. He explained what the world could do to make clean water a reality for the growing population in the world.
He noted that there are over a million people worldwide who don’t have safe drinking water, a billion people (according to the United Nations which he said were “pretty generous”) who don’t have access to safe drinking water, and 2.5 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, who don’t have access to sanitation services.
“That fundamental failure alone, that human problem, is the human face of this issue,” Gleick noted. “The failure to meet basic human needs for water leads to water-related diseases.”
But the water issues don’t end with disease. Gleick mentioned the environmental ramifications that have occurred with our dependence on water.
“It’s estimated that 30–40 percent of all freshwater fish and amphibians in North America are considered endangered or threatened, primarily because of human use of water for our own activities. … The population is growing and it’s growing fastest in places where water problems seem to be the most severe. I don’t know why humans like to live in hot, dry places, but we do, and we’re moving there very rapidly. We haven’t quite figured out how you connect land policy, development policy, and water policy. This is the water planet. If we didn’t live on the dry part, we’d probably call it water rather than earth.”
He reminded the audience that scarcity wasn’t the problem, that there isn’t a place on the planet where there isn’t enough fresh water for basic human needs—twenty liters a day, forty liters a day, and fifty liters a day, for cleaning, drinking, or sanitation.
He said the challenges revolve around use, like the fact that California alone could produce the same amount of food that it grows agriculturally with a lot less water and that our society should change our belief that ground water and service water are two different things. “We have to understand that’s a source of supply, not something to be thrown away.”
For water to be available and plentiful in the 21st century, Gleick recommended the following:
- Smart use of rainwater, all sorts of innovative rainwater harvesting programs are going on around the world
- Locate new technologies, like the salvation and advanced treatment to turn the quality of water that we couldn’t previously use into a quality of water that we can use
- The best water projects in Africa are the projects where the community is involved from the very beginning, primarily women, in what kind of water system they want, and how it is going to be managed by the community
- We have to look aggressively at the way we use water. Can we do what we want to do with less water?
Ironically, the United States uses less water than it did twenty years ago, even though the population has grown.
When the talk was finished, the audience asked which NGOs working on water were worth our donations. Garcetti moved into the microphone to answer this question.
“The NGOs do not give the money to any government officials any place that I know of. They hire people from other countries. They monitor that money. That money is as carefully guarded as you’ll ever find any place in the world. The key is the money never goes to the government. We’ll work with them. If they don’t want us, fine. We’ll move elsewhere. And that’s the key.”
Related story: The Real Cost of Bottled Water