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Boiling Point: Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse, and Canada's Water Crisis
Passionate and cogent, this could be the most important book of the year for Canadians
We are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world’s fresh water — water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, bestselling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada’s water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricultural pollution, industrial-waste dumping, boil-water advisories, and the effects of deforestation and climate change. This will be the defining issue of the coming decade, and most of us have no idea that it is on our very own doorstep.
Barlow is one of the world’s foremost water activists and she has been on the front lines of the world’s water crises for the past 20 years. She has seen first-hand the scale of the water problems facing much of the world, but also many of the solutions that are being applied. In Boiling Point, she brings this wealth of experience and expertise home to craft a compelling blueprint for Canada’s water security.
“An insane road trip to the Canadian water apocalypse courtesy of the corporate forces of ignorance and greed, and a blueprint for a rational, prosperous and dignified future by the visionary prophet of democracy and sustainability.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We are complacent. We bask in the idea that Canada holds 20% of the world’s fresh water — water crises face other countries, but not ours. We could not be more wrong. In Boiling Point, bestselling author and activist Maude Barlow lays bare the issues facing Canada’s water reserves, including long-outdated water laws, unmapped and unprotected groundwater reserves, agricultural pollution, industrial-waste dumping, boil-water advisories, and the effects of deforestation and climate change. This will be the defining issue of the coming decade, and most of us have no idea that it is on our very own doorstep.
Barlow is one of the world’s foremost water activists and she has been on the front lines of the world’s water crises for the past 20 years. She has seen first-hand the scale of the water problems facing much of the world, but also many of the solutions that are being applied. In Boiling Point, she brings this wealth of experience and expertise home to craft a compelling blueprint for Canada’s water security.
“An insane road trip to the Canadian water apocalypse courtesy of the corporate forces of ignorance and greed, and a blueprint for a rational, prosperous and dignified future by the visionary prophet of democracy and sustainability.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
312 pages, Paperback
Published September 19, 2016
9 people are currently reading
202 people want to read
About the author
Maude Barlow
47 books33 followersMaude Barlow is the bestselling author of 20 books. She sits on the board of Food & Water Watch, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, and is a counselor with the World Future Council. She served as senior water advisor to the UN General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right. She is the recipient of fourteen honorary doctorates, the Right Livelihood Award and is the current chancellor of Brescia University. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 13, 2021
Maude Barlow has been one of the most consistent and important voices in water conservation, protection and blue justice for over 20 years.
She has attacked the problems affecting clean water from every single conceivable angle. She's helped to bring light to huge injustices facing Indigenous communities with boil-water advisories, as well as pollution run-off from farms and horrendous damage to lakes and rivers and wildlife.
Maude Barlow has an encyclopedic knowledge on the problems facing our water supplies. When she lines up the problems in her book Boiling Point, the overall effect can be dizzying.
Maude Barlow has so many strong and powerful arguments that each one could easily be their own book. She presents them all in Boiling Point like a thousand punch combo and by the time you get to the end, your emotions feel hammered. It's like they just got bounced under the wheels of a whole fleet of Mack Trucks.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't walk away from Boiling Point feeling crushed or weak.
I walked away feeling mad.
Really mad.
Not mad at Maude Barlow, who is just the messenger stuck with the unfortunate job of telling us the hard truth. But mad at all the people covering up the truth. Mad at the people covering up their failures and mistakes and corruption. Covering up all of these terrible injustices where it gets to the point where having to listen to them all, feels like walking into a hoarder's house and seeing mountains and mountains of hidden dysfunction.
The question isn't "does this need to be cleaned up", the question is "where do we even start"? The mess is so colossal it's almost omnipresent.
In Maude Barlow's Boiling Point you see that the mess isn't a problem with the system anymore, the mess has become the system. The mess is now the point of the system. Perpetuating the mess, keeping everything a disaster and setting up disasters to come for short-term profits is the whole damn game.
To read Boiling Point is to be overwhelmed.
You can't help it.
This isn't one gigantic failure. It's a cascade of gigantic failures and incompetence and corruption and arrogance. Instead of one Titanic. It's a laundry list of Titanics. A horde of unsinkable ships led by blustering buffoons crashing into icebergs. Arrogant idiots never wanting to admit that their boat can sink until everybody drowns.
And whenever scientists try to even point out their mistakes, the scientists get silenced, they get censored, they get defunded, they get deplatformed.
It's almost comical how much it's not even discussed in the mainstream media.
Because the argument regarding censorship is so heated right now. It's so hot. It's like Hansel in Zoolander. And there are so many people in the mainstream media who are so concerned about freedom of speech. But they're not concerned about the censorship of scientists trying to warn us of the imminent threat of Brobdingnagian corporate incompetence wrecking our planet.
No. They're worried about the censorship of comedians.
The danger is so colourfully misrepresented that you could say the discussion of censorship itself, is being censored.
Lie by omission and lie by misrepresentation.
On one hand you have podcasters and youtubers getting rotten tomatoes tossed at them for saying or doing something that's generally offensive to some group or another. This can get weeks and weeks (if not years) of media coverage.
On the other hand we have scientists being outright silenced by their own governments, stripped of their jobs and having their research made classified or destroyed for the crime of...studying algae blooms? This gets barely a foot note. A splash page, little else.
And the truth is, this kind of censorship of science affects you and your quality of life, and the future of your children more than any stupid controversy on Netflix and Twitter.
You don't get people talking about 'cancel culture' when scientists get outright fired for researching how much toxins are going into your drinking water. But it happens. A lot. Whistle blowers against big corporations poisoning or depleting water supplies often face a lifetime of repercussions and most of their research is brushed under the rug.
And these aren't nobodies, they're the best and brightest in their field, getting defunded, deplatformed, having their careers destroyed and hit with lawsuits. And why? Because they want to tell you how dangerous it is that we're losing tons of clean water. Or swamp land. Or how badly air pollution is affecting your health. And listening to these people could save lives. In the case of Lytton, British Columbia, it could have saved a whole town.
And that's not the only double standard in the mainstream media that you'll find in Boiling Point.
There's also deregulation.
There was a controversy last year about the term 'defunding the police' when it came to activists. Mainstream media hosts and news anchors scoffed at the idea. Defund the police? Well, who's gonna protect our communities?!
In stark contrast many corporate organisations are very much in favour of leaving our communities without any kind of recourse or protection when it comes to their corporate crimes. They've been pushing for exactly that for over 30 years. They're interested in completely defunding, if not outright disbanding and dismantling any kind of law or authority that mildly affects them.
They frame this wholesale dismantling of legal repercussions against them as 'lowering regulations' to 'make things easier for business and trade'.
That doesn't sound so bad, until you realise those regulations that they are dismantling are keeping them from doing things like poisoning you and your children. Ruining your cities. Ruining your towns. Ruining your quality of life. Wasting precious natural resources. Dumping toxic waste, or building on wet lands or poisoning habitat or contaminating groundwater reserves that can never be restored. This in turn leads to less water, less rain, less snow, more dry seasons, which can lead to more things like wild fires.
Which destroy our homes. Destroy our towns. Destroy our lives.
And while this is going on, corporations also want to block regulation about putting new chemicals they've created into your water. They want to defund science that tests how those new chemicals might affect you or your children. Or how they might affect your community. How they affect animals, plants or even a pregnancy. There are many small communities who are now reporting that they aren't giving birth to boys as much due to pollution in the water and the air.
In Boiling Point you'll see how corporations want to be able to lower regulations so they can sue your country or your city for doing things like expecting them to clean up their mess. Many corporations have petitioned governments for "caps" on how much they can be fined for dumping waste and causing pollution. Not only do they not want to go to jail for poisoning people, they don't want to have to even pay for the full clean up. So if they create a mine that leaves a huge toxic mess and cleaning up that mess will cost 5 billion dollars? The cap on the fine, means they'll only have to cover a few hundred million dollars of the clean up. And the tax payer (that's you), covers the rest of the clean up to the tune of billions of dollars. So essentially they want you to be fined when they break the law.
Somehow this doesn't get on the news. It doesn't get long discussions on Bill Maher. It's not grounds for any kind of controversy. Fancy that.
It seems like something you should know, right? It seems to me that you should know what's going into your drinking water. That you should know if it's safe for your kids to swim in the nearby lake? You should be able to protect your kids so they don't get things like...brain parasites? That doesn't feel like a stifling regulation. Asking for that doesn't feel controversial to me.
I think you should know if potentially dangerous toxic waste is being piped into your lakes. I think you should know if losses of water from lakes or building highways and apartment buildings on wet lands will cause wild fires that will destroy your home. I think you should know how many billions of dollars you're losing every year thanks to pollution. How much money is being taken out of your wallet to pay for other people's crimes? Recent estimates say air pollution alone costs Canada 120 billion dollars a year in 2016.
One hundred and twenty billion dollars a year.
For corporate media who often bemoan using tax payer money to do things like give people healthcare or welfare, it's awfully convenient how quiet they get about billion dollar hand outs to pay for other people's crimes.
I might be a bit of a crazy radical but I think being able to know what's going on with your drinking water isn't a 'left wing/right wing' issue. I think it's a common sense issue. I think it's a human rights issue. I think politicians who silence scientists and sue scientists or fire scientists for warning people about potential dangers to the public good aren't 'conservative' or 'liberal'. Those politicians only have one real ideology: big business doormat. They're sycophants.
Maude Barlow's Boiling Point shows that there is a culture war going on right now. But it's not a war on comedians or youtubers. That's fake. Lets be honest. That's Jerry Springer. That's theatre.
The real war is on science. The real war is on our lakes, our wildlife, our environment, our children.
The real war is on us.
She has attacked the problems affecting clean water from every single conceivable angle. She's helped to bring light to huge injustices facing Indigenous communities with boil-water advisories, as well as pollution run-off from farms and horrendous damage to lakes and rivers and wildlife.
Maude Barlow has an encyclopedic knowledge on the problems facing our water supplies. When she lines up the problems in her book Boiling Point, the overall effect can be dizzying.
Maude Barlow has so many strong and powerful arguments that each one could easily be their own book. She presents them all in Boiling Point like a thousand punch combo and by the time you get to the end, your emotions feel hammered. It's like they just got bounced under the wheels of a whole fleet of Mack Trucks.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't walk away from Boiling Point feeling crushed or weak.
I walked away feeling mad.
Really mad.
Not mad at Maude Barlow, who is just the messenger stuck with the unfortunate job of telling us the hard truth. But mad at all the people covering up the truth. Mad at the people covering up their failures and mistakes and corruption. Covering up all of these terrible injustices where it gets to the point where having to listen to them all, feels like walking into a hoarder's house and seeing mountains and mountains of hidden dysfunction.
The question isn't "does this need to be cleaned up", the question is "where do we even start"? The mess is so colossal it's almost omnipresent.
In Maude Barlow's Boiling Point you see that the mess isn't a problem with the system anymore, the mess has become the system. The mess is now the point of the system. Perpetuating the mess, keeping everything a disaster and setting up disasters to come for short-term profits is the whole damn game.
To read Boiling Point is to be overwhelmed.
You can't help it.
This isn't one gigantic failure. It's a cascade of gigantic failures and incompetence and corruption and arrogance. Instead of one Titanic. It's a laundry list of Titanics. A horde of unsinkable ships led by blustering buffoons crashing into icebergs. Arrogant idiots never wanting to admit that their boat can sink until everybody drowns.
And whenever scientists try to even point out their mistakes, the scientists get silenced, they get censored, they get defunded, they get deplatformed.
It's almost comical how much it's not even discussed in the mainstream media.
Because the argument regarding censorship is so heated right now. It's so hot. It's like Hansel in Zoolander. And there are so many people in the mainstream media who are so concerned about freedom of speech. But they're not concerned about the censorship of scientists trying to warn us of the imminent threat of Brobdingnagian corporate incompetence wrecking our planet.
No. They're worried about the censorship of comedians.
The danger is so colourfully misrepresented that you could say the discussion of censorship itself, is being censored.
Lie by omission and lie by misrepresentation.
On one hand you have podcasters and youtubers getting rotten tomatoes tossed at them for saying or doing something that's generally offensive to some group or another. This can get weeks and weeks (if not years) of media coverage.
On the other hand we have scientists being outright silenced by their own governments, stripped of their jobs and having their research made classified or destroyed for the crime of...studying algae blooms? This gets barely a foot note. A splash page, little else.
And the truth is, this kind of censorship of science affects you and your quality of life, and the future of your children more than any stupid controversy on Netflix and Twitter.
You don't get people talking about 'cancel culture' when scientists get outright fired for researching how much toxins are going into your drinking water. But it happens. A lot. Whistle blowers against big corporations poisoning or depleting water supplies often face a lifetime of repercussions and most of their research is brushed under the rug.
And these aren't nobodies, they're the best and brightest in their field, getting defunded, deplatformed, having their careers destroyed and hit with lawsuits. And why? Because they want to tell you how dangerous it is that we're losing tons of clean water. Or swamp land. Or how badly air pollution is affecting your health. And listening to these people could save lives. In the case of Lytton, British Columbia, it could have saved a whole town.
And that's not the only double standard in the mainstream media that you'll find in Boiling Point.
There's also deregulation.
There was a controversy last year about the term 'defunding the police' when it came to activists. Mainstream media hosts and news anchors scoffed at the idea. Defund the police? Well, who's gonna protect our communities?!
In stark contrast many corporate organisations are very much in favour of leaving our communities without any kind of recourse or protection when it comes to their corporate crimes. They've been pushing for exactly that for over 30 years. They're interested in completely defunding, if not outright disbanding and dismantling any kind of law or authority that mildly affects them.
They frame this wholesale dismantling of legal repercussions against them as 'lowering regulations' to 'make things easier for business and trade'.
That doesn't sound so bad, until you realise those regulations that they are dismantling are keeping them from doing things like poisoning you and your children. Ruining your cities. Ruining your towns. Ruining your quality of life. Wasting precious natural resources. Dumping toxic waste, or building on wet lands or poisoning habitat or contaminating groundwater reserves that can never be restored. This in turn leads to less water, less rain, less snow, more dry seasons, which can lead to more things like wild fires.
Which destroy our homes. Destroy our towns. Destroy our lives.
And while this is going on, corporations also want to block regulation about putting new chemicals they've created into your water. They want to defund science that tests how those new chemicals might affect you or your children. Or how they might affect your community. How they affect animals, plants or even a pregnancy. There are many small communities who are now reporting that they aren't giving birth to boys as much due to pollution in the water and the air.
In Boiling Point you'll see how corporations want to be able to lower regulations so they can sue your country or your city for doing things like expecting them to clean up their mess. Many corporations have petitioned governments for "caps" on how much they can be fined for dumping waste and causing pollution. Not only do they not want to go to jail for poisoning people, they don't want to have to even pay for the full clean up. So if they create a mine that leaves a huge toxic mess and cleaning up that mess will cost 5 billion dollars? The cap on the fine, means they'll only have to cover a few hundred million dollars of the clean up. And the tax payer (that's you), covers the rest of the clean up to the tune of billions of dollars. So essentially they want you to be fined when they break the law.
Somehow this doesn't get on the news. It doesn't get long discussions on Bill Maher. It's not grounds for any kind of controversy. Fancy that.
It seems like something you should know, right? It seems to me that you should know what's going into your drinking water. That you should know if it's safe for your kids to swim in the nearby lake? You should be able to protect your kids so they don't get things like...brain parasites? That doesn't feel like a stifling regulation. Asking for that doesn't feel controversial to me.
I think you should know if potentially dangerous toxic waste is being piped into your lakes. I think you should know if losses of water from lakes or building highways and apartment buildings on wet lands will cause wild fires that will destroy your home. I think you should know how many billions of dollars you're losing every year thanks to pollution. How much money is being taken out of your wallet to pay for other people's crimes? Recent estimates say air pollution alone costs Canada 120 billion dollars a year in 2016.
One hundred and twenty billion dollars a year.
For corporate media who often bemoan using tax payer money to do things like give people healthcare or welfare, it's awfully convenient how quiet they get about billion dollar hand outs to pay for other people's crimes.
I might be a bit of a crazy radical but I think being able to know what's going on with your drinking water isn't a 'left wing/right wing' issue. I think it's a common sense issue. I think it's a human rights issue. I think politicians who silence scientists and sue scientists or fire scientists for warning people about potential dangers to the public good aren't 'conservative' or 'liberal'. Those politicians only have one real ideology: big business doormat. They're sycophants.
Maude Barlow's Boiling Point shows that there is a culture war going on right now. But it's not a war on comedians or youtubers. That's fake. Lets be honest. That's Jerry Springer. That's theatre.
The real war is on science. The real war is on our lakes, our wildlife, our environment, our children.
The real war is on us.
July 3, 2021
Maude Barlow doing what she does best: exposing Canada's failure to protect water for environmental integrity and to provide clean water as a basic human right (particularly for First Nations).
October 16, 2016
A disturbing examination of the loss of public rights to water in favour of corporate access, the lack of federal oversight of natural resources, and the degradation of our environment.
February 5, 2018
This is a must-read for all Canadians. Misleading statistics and poor assumptions are constantly being thrown around about the overestimated abundance of clean water in Canada. While it’s true that we are much better off than many countries, our water ressources are being threatened in a BIG way. The atrocities that big corporations get away with (*cough* Nestle *cough*) as they further line their pockets is appalling. It’s happening right under our noses, and without the swift amendment of a host of different acts and international agreements, it will continue to get worse, rapidly. Harper destroyed protections for water and the environment left, right and centre to pander to his oil and gas buddies and although the Trudeau government has taken some steps to mitigate this damage, it’s simply not enough. All of these impacts on Canada’s watersheds are, of course, taking much bigger tolls of First Nations communities, many of whom have been living under boil water advisories for decades. I won’t lie, this is not a fun read, but what Maude Barlow has been saying for years needs a bigger audience and we have a responsibility to educate ourselves.
Read
November 13, 2023This was a DNF for me. While I really respect the author and what she's doing with this book, it's very data-dense and makes for a difficult read. It's like reading a report most of the way through, and gives little insight on what a person can do besides "get rhe government to change it" which makes my anxiety really high, and gives me little hope. If people want to know the numbers and specifics is each water crisis in Canada though, this is highly recommended.
July 29, 2019
Oh boy... everyone should take an hour to listen to Dr. Albert A. Bartlett's lecture on compounded growth "Arithmetic, Population and Energy"(1) and then read this book. We're not going to run out of water, but we can run out of cheap water...
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2...
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2...
January 2, 2019
Heavy on the statistics. Good stories about what has gone wrong with the water system.
September 22, 2021
Audiobook read by: Kelly Fanson.
One of the more negative environmental books that I've found; doesn't have many suggestions for folks who aren't going to be in office in Ottawa. I hesitate to recommend any book that doesn't have any better suggestion than to call your elected official, but the information in the book is fascinating and the messages are important.
One of the more negative environmental books that I've found; doesn't have many suggestions for folks who aren't going to be in office in Ottawa. I hesitate to recommend any book that doesn't have any better suggestion than to call your elected official, but the information in the book is fascinating and the messages are important.
October 24, 2021
She must be of Canadian origen.
July 24, 2022
Great overview of the majors dangers and political/legal battles faces the future of Canada’s water and where to go from here.
May 23, 2023
TERRIFYING but so important. Please read this.
January 10, 2017
Not an elegant book but full of ideas and perspective to cause me to delve deeper into what Barlow is writing about. This is one of those books where one could come away feeling overwhelmed and insignificant by the sheer audaciousness of what is happening in Canada to our water. But what I came away with is the belief that WE have a say and must realize that water is not something handed down to us by the denizens of the elite, but a right given to each of us and the generations to come. That might sound simple enough, but this book magnified not only our right to water and how we use it, but how corporations and trade agreements are trying to strip those rights right out from under us. If you're not willing to get involved, then this book will at least educate you. After that, it's up to you.
June 23, 2016
"Each and every one of us has a personal responsibility to take action," writes Barlow and after reading this book and understanding just how messed up and disastrous the state of our water is, it's impossible not to feel both (a) disgusted by how greed and short-sightedness has effed us up, and (b) inspired to push back and fight for the human right to clean water. A must-read, though a difficult one (I started crying at pg. 120), especially if you (like me) have kept your head in the sand on the complexities of this critical issue.
March 27, 2017
A very easily accessible and informative read about the state of water in Canada. Honestly, it was slightly terrifying and VERY frustrating to learn about things like the complete mess that government oversight is in right now, and also the state of the water available on First Nations reserves. It opened my eyes to a lot of situations I was completely unaware of and really drove home the point that we can't take our water for granted, we can't keep abusing the system the way we do, because there definitely is a "boiling point" and we should be encouraging our government to do everything in its power to keep it from getting worse.
Read
October 4, 2017This forever changed the way I thought about water in Canada, and at times brought me to teary-eyed despair. But it also gives us the grounds for action, and thus grounds for home. A must-read for anyone interested in environmental issues and government policy in Canada.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews