Nestlé CEO sounds water scarcity alarm

Water is the foundation of life, right? It takes up more space on the Earth than land does, it's the thing us humans can't live more than a few days without and it's the thing that we are probably the closest to having a real, life-threatening crisis around in the near future. We already have people dying from a lack of access to clean drinking water right now. In areas where the population is growing rapidly, sometimes the issue is that the water sources are being privatized, polluted, or simply run out of water because demand is too high. My favorite shocking example to point to is the Colorado River, which no longer makes it to the Pacific Ocean because so much of its water is used.

I was reading a Huffington Post article about the CEO of Nestlé, an $86 billion a year global company, who is starting to talk about the need for a coordinated, global effort to deal with the fact that water shortages are going to get more common. It shocked me.

Not what he was saying, I'm aware of that. For me, the seminal movie about water and the effect its shortage is and will grow to have on the world is Blue Gold: World Water Wars. Buy it, watch it and take heed.

It was that he was bringing it up at all in the first place. I'm not going to dig into the fact that Nestlé takes natural fresh water from all over the Earth and ships it to other parts of the Earth to sell it in bottles, and I'm not going to blather about the amount of water that gets used in producing all of Nestlé's products. I'm here to praise him.

This is the CEO of a major, major company pointing out the fact that we, as a society, need to address an environmental catastrophe heading our way.

Wow. I hope people listen when he says something.

Image courtesy of twiga269-FEMEN via flickr