Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century

Too Dirty, Too Little, Too Much

Avi Brisman, Bill McClanahan, Nigel South, Reece Walters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781137529855
• eBook ISBN: 9781137529862
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offers the first monograph on the subject of water-related crimes whilst also engaging with harms and security

Addresses not only historical issues, but contemporaneous reactions to ongoing problems, including key resistance struggles

Coincides with the International Decade for Action, "Water for Sustainable Development," 2018–2028

© The Author(s) 2018

Avi Brisman, Bill McClanahan, Nigel South and Reece WaltersWater, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First CenturyCritical Criminological Perspectiveshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52986-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Avi Brisman^{1, 2, 3} , Bill McClanahan¹, Nigel South^{4, 2} and Reece Walters²

(1)

School of Justice Studies College of Justice and Safety, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY, USA

(2)

School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

(3)

Newcastle Law School Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia

(4)

Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

End Abstract

In the children’s book, 11 Experiments That Failed (Offill 2011), a young girl poses the question, ‘[c]an a message be sent in a bottle to a faraway land?’ Her hypothesis is that ‘[t]he hole in the bottom of the toilet leads to the sea’, and she sets out to test this by placing a message in a bottle and seeing what happens when she flushes it down the toilet. The following page reveals an illustration of the girl’s house with water pouring out of the windows and the girl adrift on a toilet seat. Bobbing next to her is a potpourri of household items.

The girl’s astonished mother, calf-deep in water, clutches a cordless phone. The only text on the page is as follows:

What Happened:

• Toilet overflowed.
• Plumber called.
• Still awaiting rescue.

While the story is fictional, the image is far from fantastical. And while the girl’s hypothesis proves incorrect under the conditions of her experiment, she might have encountered different results in another location.

In the weeks prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics (officially known as the ‘Games of the XXXI Olympiad’ and commonly known as ‘Rio 2016’), which took place from 5 August 2016 to 21 August 2016, a number of media outlets reported on the water quality of Rio’s Guanabara Bay, the site of competitions in marathon swimming, sailing and windsurfing. Writing for The New York Times, Jacobs (2016: B9) described ‘a veritable petri dish of pathogens... from rotaviruses that can cause diarrhea and vomiting to drug-resistant “superbacteria” that can be fatal to people with weakened immune systems’. Dr Daniel Becker, a local physician, warned that ‘[f]oreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap, and they risk getting sick from all those microorganisms’ (quoted in Jacobs 2016; Ward-Henninger 2016; see also Editorial 2016). Apparently in Rio, inadequate infrastructure meant that in some cases, ‘the hole in the bottom of the toilet’ did indeed lead to the sea.

Back in 2009, when Rio won the bid to host the Olympics, Brazil promised that 80 per cent of the sewage that flowed into the bay would be treated by the start of the Games, and the country pledged $4 billion to meet this goal (Branch 2016; Editorial 2016; Jacobs 2016). While the 80 per cent benchmark proved difficult to quantify, in the end, Brazil spent just $170 million, most of which was used for trash-collecting boats and portable berms to block sludge and debris, but which did little to stop bacteria and viruses from flowing into the bay (Editorial 2016; Jacobs 2016). As Branch (2016: 51) described, officials ‘strapped “eco barriers,” giant strainers to hold back the garbage, across some rivers and employed “eco boats” to trawl the bay closest to the venues, scooping up all visible trash, most of it plastic bottles, bags and diapers’. This strategy—one commonly employed in the face of environmental problems—is known as ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (see generally Brisman 2014; Walters 2014; Wyatt 2014).

To be fair, as Branch (2016: 50) explained in an article published days before the opening ceremony, ‘[e]very two years, alternating between winter and summer, the Olympics bring international scrutiny to a host city. Promises made at the time that the bid was awarded, years earlier, are scoured to see if they were upheld’.¹ Thus, the microscopic examination that Rio underwent was not an anomaly.² Sadly, neither are the conditions of its waters: much of the sewage and trash generated by the region’s 12 million inhabitants continues to flow untreated into Rio’s waters (Editorial 2016; Jacobs 2016)—making Rio rather similar to many other regions of the world.

Depending on the source, between half a billion and two billion people around the world lack safe and adequate drinking water, and more than two and a half billion people do not have access to improved sanitation facilities—a problem that threatens the quality of existing water supplies (Arnold 2009; Cohen 2016; Fonjong and Fokum 2017; Meisch 2016; Sarni 2015; Schriever 2013; Witt 2011)³ and one that has, depending on one’s perspective, either been exacerbated by or contributed to the global trend of privatizing public water supplies and infrastructure (see Arnold 2009; Fonjong and Fokum 2017; Chapter 5). According to Jon Freedman, leader of Global Partnerships and Government Affairs for General Electric Co.’s water business, ‘the world’s reached a tipping point where demand for water is now greater than supply, and I think we’re actually seeing this play out across headlines all over the world. You know, we’ve seen this in Brazil. The taps are literally running dry in Sao Paulo. We’re seeing it in China and even here in the U.S. in California’ (OnPoint 2015). Similarly, Will Sarni (2015), Enterprise Water Strategy Consulting Leader of Deloitte Consulting LLP, states that ‘[t]here is a projected 40 per cent gap between water supply and demand, assuming business-as-usual practices... driven by global trends such as increasing population and the rise of the middle class, coupled with increased demand for food and energy’.⁴ Recent studies show that nearly one-third of the world’s 37 largest aquifers are being drained faster than they are being replenished—aquifers that happen to be concentrated in food-producing regions that support close to two billion people (Barringer 2015).⁵ To further complicate matters, water shortages have a disproportionate impact on women, who often spend hours each day searching for water for their families (Arnold 2009; Cohen 2016; Naiga et al. 2017; see also Furness 2010: 190; see generally Kimmelman 2017; Yee 2016)—a point to which we will return in Chapters 3 and 5. As such, it is rather unsurprising that the World Economic Forum described water issues as being among the top three risks facing the planet and global society. Summarizing the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report of 2014, Walton (2014) of the international water charity and science reporting agency, Circle of Blue, wrote: ‘Too much, too little, too dirty. For the third consecutive year, reckless use and abuse of water is seen by global authorities as having the potential to seriously disrupt social stability, upend business supply chains, imperil food and energy production, and generally make life miserable for billions of people’. In 2015, the World Economic Forum ranked ‘water crisis’ as the top risk (Hinckley 2016; http://​www3.​weforum.​org/​docs/​WEF_​Global_​Risks_​2015_​Report15.​pdf).

This book attempts to address some of these issues and challenges and provides criminology’s first book-length contribution to the study of water and water-related crimes, harms and security in an effort to produce a comprehensive criminological overview of the contemporary and historical relationship between water and crime. Our principal focus here is fresh water but of necessity this must also embrace consideration of the sources of fresh water and the destinations of used and waste water, the ‘inflow’ from the sky, springs and rivers (pure or polluted), and the ‘outflow’ into sewers, onto fields and into coastal marine systems. The book therefore draws a (permeable) line around the system of fresh water origins, uses and disposals and the dependent ecosystems.

Chapter 2, Too Dirty: Water and Pollution, discusses water pollution as a global problem with regional and local manifestations. Water pollution, whether from point sources (e.g., the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010) or non-point sources (e.g., quotidian stormwater runoff), exhibits local, national, regional and global dimensions and constitutes one of the most pervasive threats to global ecological health (see Carrabine et al. 2014: 402–404; White and Heckenberg 2014: 158; see generally Brisman 2002). For example, freshwater animal species face an extinction rate five times that of terrestrial animals because of the extent of water pollution and overfishing (Harwood 2010). In this chapter, the examples mentioned above and other instances and forms of water pollution are examined and described. The goal is to understand the history, causes and cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Too Dirty: Water and Pollution
• 3. Too Little: Water and Access
• 4. Too Threatened: Water and Climate Change
• 5. Too Costly: Water and Privatization
• 6. Too Insecure: Water and Security
• 7. Too Important: Water and Resistance
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter