Flow

The movie Flow was a documentary film about the problems affecting one of our most natural resources: water. The film described the water cycle for every purpose for which it is used, everything from drinking, to bathing, to waste management. It showed one sequence on the water cycle where it showed that we drink the same recycled water that we have previously urinated. The first part of the movie explained water cycles and showing that our clean water supply is dwindling. It seems hard to believe with 70% of our planet being made of water that the supply is dwindling but only a small percentage of that water is drinkable.

The second part of the movie closely examined many situations all over the world where the supply of freshwater is being threatened. Globalization and big business seemed to be the major source of the problem. Most of the dire situations abroad seemed to be taking place in countries such as India, Argentina, and a country where the filmmakers spent a lot of time was Lesotho. The big corporation that was causing problems for the local people and local ecosystem in one example was Coca-Cola. Through interviews with locals we had found out that before the soda giant came to that part of the country, their water supply, farming, and overall environment was healthy and self-sustaining. Soon after the factory opened the water supply dwindled and farming yielded a fraction of what it used to. All of those examples seemed distant until they had a part of the film that dealt with a problem occurring in Michigan. Nestle, the water bottling giant, who makes many well-known bottled waters, was pumping water from the local stream and depleting the water supply to the area. Local activists took the company to court over the fact that Nestle was profiting from water they did not own and they did not have the rights to. Initially the court found favor with the activists. However after an appeal the court granted Nestle the rights to continue pumping and selling the water from local streams.

Just like turning on a light switch with electricity, we as a society take for granted the pleasure of walking over to a faucet and getting clean and unlimited drinking water on command. We rarely, if ever, think about where that water came from and how much of it we are consuming. Throughout the movie we see that in many other parts of the world, this easy access to clean water is not the reality. The movie also talked a great deal about dams and how many times they do much greater harm than good. One of the activists talked about the World Bank and their inefficiency of money distribution when it comes to providing clean water. One thing that he said that really caught my attention was the fact that many small villages and towns simply need a small water well to pump water from the ground, not a big billion dollar dam. The phrase he said was something along the lines of the World Bank is able to spend a million dollars in one place but not a thousand dollars in a thousand places. This movie really made me appreciate water as a natural resource and just how really valuable it is to the human race.