2009 Global Business Forum - Session Papers
Social Entrepreneurship and Water in a Connected World
VIDEO AUDIO PAPER (PDF) |
At first these questions might seem anomalous in a conference titled “Harnessing the Power of the Connected World” and populated with panel discussions on the trends and technology propelling global commerce. But the makers of the ambitious documentary One Water clearly believe the issues they raise are relevant to those driving the engines of capitalism.
Enough Global Business Forum attendees agreed with that premise to generate a sizable audience for a screening of the movie, which was also attended by producer, writer and director Sanjeev Chatterjee, executive director of the Knight Center for International Media at UM’s School of Communication, and co-director and editor Ali Habashi, who is with the Arnold Center for Confluent Media Studies at UM’s College of Engineering.
One Water was shot in 15 countries and is set to a sweeping score performed by the Russian National Orchestra. With only the sparest narration, it takes viewers on a visual journey through water use in different cultures — some where it is plentiful, others where it is not. There are lavish shots of a water celebration in Japan and a day at a spa on the Danube, as well as a chronology of one day’s use of water in an Indian village. But the film is most effective when it contrasts the industrial world with the developing world — pedestrians in an American city clutching, then tossing their plastic water bottles, versus women in rural India spending half a day hauling water from a remote well in vessels carried on their heads.
Appropriately for a business forum, the movie itself is a marketing phenomenon. Bearing UM’s imprint throughout, including narration by President Donna E. Shalala, it has been adapted for a variety of outlets; there is the feature-length version, which runs 68 minutes, as well as a television version, a nonverbal version and a live orchestral version, all of which can be suited to educational or corporate purposes. Meanwhile, it has toured the festival circuit, screening in California, Ireland and Switzerland. Chatterjee said that an international television distribution deal was near completion.Chatterjee explained that the inspiration for One Water came after he heard a United Nations official say that if the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, the wars of the 21st century would be fought over water. Chatterjee was returning from South Africa at the time, and had a long airplane flight to ponder that statement. “Growing up in India, I knew what he was talking about,” he said. Yet in water-stressed South Florida, “we don’t really have visual evidence of what is being talked about.”
The statistics are alarming: 1.5 billion people don’t have access to clean water, and 25 percent of the people in developing nations must purchase their water from private vendors.
Following the screening, a panel convened to discuss how the media have been reporting water issues and how technology is likely to affect that. Panelists included Sam Grogg, the dean of the School of Communication; Rich Beckman, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication; and social entrepreneurs J. Carl Ganter, co-founder and director of Circle of Blue, a clearinghouse for journalism and science on the global freshwater crisis; and John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates.
It was Oldfield — a self-described “old-school lobbyist” whose nonprofit organization lobbies for worldwide access to “safe, affordable and sustainable supplies of drinking water and adequate sanitation” — who asked why One Water didn’t provide more information about how to help. When the credits rolled, he said, “I’m sitting on the edge of my seat. What do I do? What are my options?” Oldfield added that with 50 percent of the world’s hospital beds occupied by people suffering from water-borne diseases, the urgency is real. His organization reaches out to governments and philanthropic organizations to fund projects to make safe water available in communities where it is not.
Habashi explained that the piece took a different approach from traditional documentaries, which bombard viewers with facts. The goal with One Water, he said, was to influence viewers and inspire them to seek out solutions in their communities. The documentary’s Web site provides many of the resources Oldfield — and hopefully other viewers — was looking for.
The gulf between advocate and informer appeared to be bridged by Carl Ganter, who has taken his training as a journalist and focused it with the zeal of an advocate on the health of the world’s freshwater supply. His organization, Circle of Blue, part of the nonpartisan think tank the Pacific Institute, not only promotes and disseminates water-related stories that might otherwise go unnoticed, but also generates its own articles and maintains a sophisticated Web site with multimedia presentations including interactive maps and videos.
Ganter provided a stark illustration of what he is up against when it comes to distributing water-related stories using a program called Newsmap. The program depicts the popularity of a given day’s stories, as aggregated by Google, in boxes; the bigger the box, the more popular the story. Predictably, entertainment and celebrity news was outsized.
“Why is it the big stories that could affect mankind are the smallest?” Grogg wondered.
“Maybe we’re not doing our job properly,” Beckman, a photojournalist who has reported extensively from Africa, replied. “For example, Gaza is a major environmental story, and it’s not being reported that way.”
But the consensus was that the reporting — and the resulting public awareness and interest — will change. A new generation is already gleaning information from myriad nontraditional sources — not just the Web, but technologies like Twitter as well. In the developing world the adoption of cell phones means that people can send and receive information about topics that affect their health, like pollution, rapidly, helping keep communities up-to-date about life-saving developments. For example, Ganter recounted how people in Mexico used their cell phones to photograph factory workers dumping wastewater at night. Those citizen journalists helped expose the practice.
By Tristram Korten
