Water is Life

My interest in water campaigns beyond Europe began with my connection to the Water Watchers in Ontario, Canada, a group that came together in 2006 to protest Nestlé’s extraction and bottling of groundwater in their county (Wellington County) and that has since kicked out not only Nestlé but its successor Blue Triton, a beverage company owned by the private equity group One Rock Capital Partners and Metropoulos and Co.

Over the years, I supported collaborative community research projects in and around these struggles, first through two SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) grants I received in 2020 with Robert Case from the University of Waterloo, and now through my work for a new network called Just Water Futures, which aims to create a publicly available digital structure to communicate the rapidly evolving intersection of financial actors and global water provisioning (along the entire hydrosocial cycle) to a broader public. More news, including our Just Water Futures digital platform, will be shared soon.