It happens five minutes away from the campus but I do not have any access and honestly I think at this moment of my life, I have no interest…
Turkish police officers stand guard on a boat in Istanbul’s Golden Horn, Turkey, Monday, March 16, 2009, during the opening ceremony of the 5th World Water Forum. A global conference on water resources is opening in Turkey, with sanitation, climate change and increasing demand emerging as key themes on the agenda.
(AP Photo/Umit Bektas, Pool)
World Water Forum and need for ?pax water? around Turkey
We will be concentrating on water-related topics during the coming week due to the 5th World Water Forum, which will start today in İstanbul.
Drastic changes in water policy needed, says World Water Forum chief
Professor Oktay Tabasaran, secretary-general of the 5th World Water Forum (WWF5) starting in İstanbul today, has said alarm bells are ringing for the world as the threat of water stress is closer than ever if current trends continue.
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As Arakan Joins the Force!
Every school child learns about the importance of water, about the fantastic liquid that keeps this planet going. Being a vital resource as it is, people have always busied themselves with methods for collecting it. He who controls water reserves and say “they are mine” is the real founder of civil society, to paraphrase Rouseau. This week, the age-old effort to keep water away from private ownership received a simple expression as the World Water Forum which convened in Istanbul. The WWF is a tri-annual event which is organized by the World Water Council, a private organization whose most influential members are private water companies and some of the world’s biggest dam construction companies. As the opening ceremony began, two activists put up a banner reading “No Risky Dams” in protest of the World Water Forum’s promotion of the Ilisu dam. The police arrested the two protestors and they face deportation from the country. Meanwhile, outside the conference center, riot police used water cannons against protestors who shouted “water for life, not for profit”. In the good old days, schoolchildren learned about the wonderful cycle of nature. It went something like this: rivers flow into the sea, sea water evaporate and form clouds, the clouds bring us rain, and the rain flows back to the rivers. Maybe now we can add the human dimension: some people capture water in dam-constructed reservoirs, the forces of law and order use the water to disperse other people who oppose such capturing, and the used water flow back into the reservoirs. Enters Bruno Latour and his theory about the role of non-human materials in the assembling of society?