Last Call at the Oasis

I watched Last Call at the Oasis (also http://www.takepart.com/lastcall/) recently at the cinema, the so called last part of the "Participant's Media Crisis Quartet" after Food Inc., An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman. It was a great documentary for sure and disappointing as always how few people came to see the show considering only one was scheduled. 

I am not running over all the details but I tell you about the opening scene  and a few bits and pieces. The film starts showing people in poor countries fighting over water. These people either regularly experience severe drought or floods but they all lack clean water for consumption, and their situation is not going to change. They have to live along polluted rivers, watch their livestock die and crops dry out while working hard to survive. The music then changes to Pink's "Raise your glass" in which she sings "Why so serious?" Next you see people in the First World waste water on public fountains, water their lawns, power wash driveways, splash around in pools, grow crops in the middle of the desert with irrigation water that has travelled 100s of miles through pipelines, and you see Las Vegas. Las Vegas depends on water imports especially now that the reservoir behind Hoover Dam is drying up and the years are counted until the water level is so low that the connected power plant will stop operation. While Las Vegas wants to steal its water from even further afield I think it deserves to go down and plainly dry out. The sprawl and wastefulness of this city is simply disgusting. And in a country like the USA people pay next to nothing for their water which is even more disgusting! The film also pointed out that California is the next Australia and we all know how dried up, burnt down and deserted Down Under is. The days of eating produce grown in California might as well be counted too.   
 
Unfortunately I can't find my favourite quotes from that film right now but I recommend watching the trailer at least. The quotes went somewhere along the lines of 'humanity is capable of committing infinite destruction of the Earth and still be ignorant about it'. In one part of the film a bunch of business people tried to figure out how to market "recycled water" that for example would come from recycling urine. Naturally most people's reaction was "yikes, no way would I drink this, that's disgusting". The technology exists and is being used on spaceships already. So these guys come up with some clever marketing and get people to drink the recycled water and most realise it's fine and tastes like any other drinking water. One woman proves herself to be bloody stupid and ignorant saying something like, why do you bother doing this, we surely don't have a water shortage considering the size of the oceans'. Dah! Time to wake up!             

The film was presented by Community Renewable Energy Waterloo, an organisation that I had not heard about but that certainly tries to make a difference here in the region. And while I see more garden signs here advertising that a house is "Bullfrog Powered" than in Edmonton, living in an apartment sucks in so far that we have no influence whatsoever about the effiency of our appliances, the quality of the building, the energy provider etc. The other day I spoke to someone from Reduce the Juice and she said they are trying to get the green bin (organics) into apartment buildings as well. Wouldn't it be nice. It's a lot harder to have a compost bin in an apartment than in a garden!