Season 1
6 episodes
7 min. per episode
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A determined activist battles corporate giants, risking everything to secure clean water for her community and uncover buried secrets.
Episodes
In the state of Arkansas, set in the Ozark Mountains, is a town called Harrison. Population 12,953. It has a city hall. Houses set on quaint tree-lined streets, and like any town of this size, a Public Works Department that takes care of city streets and manages waste. In fact, it takes a crew of four people working full time just to manage the waste produced here in Harrison, and that system costs millions of dollars to build and run.
The Namgis First Nations Tribe in Alert Bay, British Columbia has always fished for salmon. In recent years, a number of fish farming operations have appeared in their waters. These have brought diseases to local wild salmon stocks and threatened the livelihood of these people. Newer land-based recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) are now appearing. They offer the opportunity to meet consumer demand for cleaner, greener, and safer seafood.
Des Moines, Iowa is a metropolitan area with over 500,000 inhabitants. Their drinking water comes from two principal water sources: the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers. Each year the city spends millions of dollars to remove nitrates from their drinking water. Since 2012, the Des Moines Water Works, which operates one of the most sophisticated nitrate removal facilities in the world, has been forced to operate their facility over 300 days per year. The city is no longer financially able to bear the cost of removing these nitrates, which primarily come from agricultural runoff in three upstream counties (Calhoun, Sac, and Buena Vista). In 2105 the Des Moines Waterworks used the Citizen Suit provision in the Clean Water Act to file a suit in federal court against the drainage districts of three upstream counties. The case-which is among the first highly-targeted attempts to force those following the industrial agricultural model to pay for the externalized costs of their production-goes to trial in Sioux City, Iowa in 2017.
In the kitchen, every ingredient present in the pantry or refrigerator contains a unique WATER FOOTPRINT. This number corresponds to the amount of water embedded in the production of the food or the VIRTUAL WATER footprint. In the bathroom, sink faucets, toilets, and shower heads are all components of the household water footprint. In the bedroom, all clothes, sheets, pillows, and stuffed animals each contain a specific water footprint. Accounting for both direct and indirect (or virtual) uses of water of a consumer or producer, the water footprint is an assessment of the social environmental, and economic sustainability of the different commodities of everyday life.
When people talk about conservation, they talk about saving trees, or pandas, or maybe turning off the faucet to save water. When they talk about efficiency they mean doing more with less, like adding a small aerator to a water faucet to reduce water flow. So when it comes to water, is it better to be efficient or conserve? Or - both?
6 films on subjects ranging from water footprints to clean drinking water, with funding provided by a variety of foundations and public institutions.