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Susan Lea Smith is a water justice activist and an environmental and natural resources law professor at the Willamette University in the United States. She shares her concern over the water crisis and the unjust distribution of water in the world, as well as efforts made to address this issue from a rights based perspective in her country.
Smith was speaking to Fredrick Nzwili at the Global Forum of the Ecumenical Water Network (EWN) of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which took place from 25-27 October in Nairobi, Kenya, with twenty delegates including church officials and experts on water issues from church based groups and international organizations.
Can you briefly outline the work you are doing in the area of water and sanitation in your country or elsewhere?
Our work is primarily water justice advocacy. We try to raise awareness of the global water crisis, the lack of clean water and sanitation around the world, and specific issues like bottled water.
Along with that, we have lobbied for the recognition of an international human right to water. We have lobbied in the United States with respect to that. We’ve done some regional discussions with respect to implementation of the human right to water. We’ve also lobbied in our own community to try to keep Nestle away from taking our water resources and using them for bottled water.
That’s what’s happening in our country, but a large part of our work actually is in other countries where our primary function is to raise money to support communities that are trying to provide themselves with clean water and sanitation. So that’s been our primary function around the world.
What challenges are you are facing in the work for water?
I think the challenge that we all face is getting people to focus on the importance of water. It’s something that we take for granted, particularly in the United States, where our water is clean. We drink it, we don’t even think about it most of the time. So, we are getting people to understand that we are facing a global water crisis because of climate change and over-consumption by the few. We don’t have enough water to meet what Gandhi would have said “our people’s desires or wants”. We have plenty of water to meet people’s needs and that is something that we have to really convince people of.
How are you overcoming the challenges?
We do it person to person and congregation to congregation, we try to go to the churches and do presentations that try to raise awareness. We’ve also prepared a curriculum on water for adult education in our churches and that’s our primary effort really.
How has the EWN helped you in your work?
The network has helped in so many ways. One of the great things that they have done is they have prepared the Seven Weeks for Water which provides us with worship and adult education resources that we can drawn on in formulating our own curriculum and our own worship services.
Other things that they have done is, gone ahead and provided us with a way to meet with people internationally who are doing the same work-the networking opportunities have been wonderful.
But I have to say from an American standpoint, the biggest contribution of the Ecumenical Water Network to our work has been in the area of raising our awareness of the human right to water.
Americans don’t think in those human rights terms because our country hasn’t signed on to the treaties that guarantee human rights. One of the things that I realized when I participated in Geneva is that around the world that’s the way people do think about it (water), and maybe one of the things that we could do is to start Americans thinking in terms of the human right to water and sanitation.
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