A new collaboration has formed in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota, calling themselves The Water Reclaimers. This collaboration is made up of people from environmental nonprofits, water quality entities, art organizations, city government, restaurants, and more.

Photo by perpetualstroll, Creative Commons NC, SA from Flickr

Together, the Water Reclaimers represent a wide range of perspectives and expertise on the issues impacting our drinking water. Their goal is to creatively engage people in trusting Twin Cities drinking water that sustains all life. This includes sharing information with about water quality, bottled water, tap water, and water as a commons.

The Water Reclaimers say that You, too, can be a Water Reclaimer simply by learning how to trust our water!

We are proud to use The Commons Mark to indicate our part in a movement to embrace water as a commons. The commons is everything we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished, to future generations. Whether it’s from your tap, a bottle, a spring, the sky or a public fountain, we honor water as a commons.

Currently the Twin Cities Water Reclaimer collaboration includes people from:
•A Single Drop
•Birchwood Café
•Corporate Accountability International
•Eureka Recycling
•Friends of Coldwater Springs
•In the Heart of the Beast Theater
•Minneapolis Councilmember Cam Gordon’s office
•Minnesota Department of Public Health
•Northland Bioneers
•On the Commons
•Saint Paul Public Works
•Saint Paul Regional Water Services
•Twin Cities Public Television
•V Creative

For more information about this collaborative: Contact Rachel Breen at On the Commons or Dianna Kennedy at Eureka Recycling

The victory was organized by Defending Water in Maine and other local organizations, with help from Food and Water Watch of Washington, D.C. “They’re pounding on the door of one community after another,” said Emily Posner with the Defending Water in Maine campaign. “We’re designating water as a part of the Commons, where everyone has the right to use water and no one has the right to sell it for profit. Maine’s economic development should be controlled by the residents of this great state, not by Nestle.”

Photo by Lance and Erin, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, was pleased by the water district’s decision: “Water should be safe, clean and affordable for all, not a commodity to line corporate pockets or to be taken and peddled as a luxury item. The people of southern Maine have spoken and what they want is control of their own water, not indentured servitude to the corporate water barons.”

She added, “Economically vulnerable towns that may be seduced by the lure of new jobs from new extraction sites need to know that these so-called promises are nothing but lies concocted by Nestle to dupe them into handing over their water.”

A recent analysis by Food & Water Watch, The Unbottled Truth About Bottled Water Jobs, finds that:

• In 2006, the nation’s 628 water-bottling plants employed fewer than 15,000 people
• A typical bottled water plant employs 24 workers, between two and ten of which are local residents
• The average salary for a bottled water worker in 2006 was $41,236, almost $10,000 a year less than the average manufacturing job
• In 2006, bottled water manufacturing had one of the highest rates of workplace injury and illness, with one out of every 11 workers maimed or infirm—a rate 50 percent higher than the broader manufacturing and construction industry.

It used to be that advertisers would slip a Coke can or bag of Doritos onto the set of a sitcom or American Idol in return for large fees. This is itself objectionable because the public, in return for the free use of its airwaves, deserves independent programming, not incessant paid commercials disguised as entertainment. But even this principle is being superseded by the next generation of product placement: Advertisers are working closely with producers and writers to integrate their products into storylines and use products to show the values and aspirations of characters.

Photo by Ben-Millett, via Flicker, licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

A young professional might have an iPod, say, or an attractive woman might conspicuously wear something bearing a Banana Republic label (camera zooms in for a closeup and the character talks about it). The producers of “The Office” recently built two episodes around a character, Dwight, using a Staples paper-shredder in a way that showcased its small size and power.

The idea is to make brand-name products seem so seamless a part of the entertainment that viewers don’t even know they are being advertised to. Now that brand-name products are being integrated into programming, advertisers suddenly want to protect the integrity of programming. Any on-screen disclosures of product placements would be objectionable because they would “interrupt the entertainment experience,” one advertising executive complained to the New York Times. Funny, I’ve never heard advertisers complain in the past about their incessant commercial breaks, which are a rather serious “interruption of the entertainment experience.”

The new commercial invasions of programming have provoked citizen groups like Commercial Alert to call for explicit marketing disclosures. “TV stations pretend that these are just ordinary programs rather than paid ads,” according to Commercial Alert. “This is an affront to basic honesty. Product placements are inherently deceptive, because many people do not realize that they are, in fact, advertisements.”

Commercial Alert is trying to get the government to require disclosure of product placement in all media, including TV, movies, videos, video games, books and “adversongs.” You can find more about the deceptive nature of product placement here. The FCC is considering whether to require explicit marketing disclosures for product placement. You can comment to the FCC by clicking here.

Creative Commons license by Debcil, NC, from Flickr

But Food & Water Watch, a national consumer advocacy group, is concerned that minute scientific detail and unfamiliar chemical names used in these reports could mislead many people into thinking their water is tainted when it’s perfectly safe.

That’s why they’ve issued a handy report to help all of us without degrees in chemical engineering understand whether or not our water is safe. You will find it free at Food and Water Watch.

The report explains how to decipher and understand what small amounts of scary substances in our water really mean.

The Washington, D.C. water supply, for instance, contains arsenic in amounts that range from none to 0.5 parts-per-billion. That sounds bad, but even the highest readings for arsenic in the Nation’s Capital measure just one-twentieth of the EPA safety guidelines. Some of the arsenic occurs naturally as deposits in the soil break down, while the rest is runoff from pesticides applied to fruit orchards.

Ideally, such a report should spur citizens to lobby for more stringent environmental regulations on orchards, not swear off tap water in favor of Aquafina.

Tap water is extensively tested under EPA regulations that are far more stringent than those used in the bottled water industry, which generally does not issue water quality reports despite growing public concern about chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into our bodies and the environment.

“Drinking water is a basic human right and every consumer should know what’s in theirs,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “With faith in the quality of their tap water, consumers can feel confident in choosing it over expensive, wasteful bottled water.”

In 1988 the physicist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies first sounded the warning that global climate change was coming—soon. Speaking before Congress, he testified that global climate change was not a potential problem for the distant future. It was happening all around us.

He spoke to Congress again this week, 20 years to the day of his famous testimony, and took the opportunity to discuss what can be done to curtail climate change.

Conservatives, who have long vilified Hansen, were outraged that a scientist would dare offer policy proposals to lessen the environmental, social and economic devastation of an international disaster. Presumably they also believe that doctors should be limited to making a diagnosis, leaving the prescribing of medicine to politicians, oil industry lobbyists and the Heritage Foundation.

Hansen endorsed a phase-out of all coal use, except where carbon emissions are sequestered below ground. He forcefully rejected efforts to find more oil through off-shore drilling and tar shale projects.

And he advocated a commons approach in moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy, modeled closely on the Cap-and-Dividend proposal promoted by On the Commons Senior Fellow Peter Barnes.

“Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction,” he said, citing Barnes’s book Who Owns the Sky? in his footnotes… “The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children.”

“Carbon tax with 100 percent divident is non-regressive,” he continued. “On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses.

“Demand for low-carbon high-efficiency products will spur innovation, making our products more competitive on international markets. Carbon emissions will plummet as energy efficiency and renewable energies grow rapidly. Black soot, mercury and other fossil fuel emissions will decline. A brighter, cleaner future, with energy independence, is possible.”

Like the previous three iCommons Summits, the Sapporo one will bring together a highly eclectic array of digital pioneers from dozens of nations: free-culture filmmakers from Britain, copyfighters from Croatia, open-access publishing advocates from the U.S., open-business entrepreneurs from Luxembourg, free software hackers from India, Creative Commons leaders from around the world, and many others. For more about the Summit, click here and for more about the conference schedule of speakers and labs, click here.

Earlier this week, Senator Barack Obama joined with arch-conservative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to introduce “The Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008.” The legislation will provide public access to federal grant and contract information through a website, USASpending.gov. The bill would also require all federal contracts and details of the bidding process to be published online. Read more about the bill here.

Photo by turtlemoon via Flickr, licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainorphans/169239396

The legislation builds on the excellent online tools developed by the National Priorities Project, which is well-worth a visit. The NPP website enables Internet users determine how their individual tax bills are allocated among the military, human services and other budget items. Based on your individual payments, the interactive tool spits out specific numbers.

A similar calculator lets you figure out budget tradeoffs. For example, how many one-year university scholarships could be financed if we were to do away with nuclear weapons? In my town, taxpayers paid $1.9 million for nuclear weapons, a sum that would pay for 194 scholarships. There are many other fascinating features of the site, such as how much the Iraq War is costing taxpayers.

This work has some nice parallels at the Sunlight Foundation, which developed a Google Earth application that plotted the locations for almost 1,500 earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill. The feature allowed people to get a graphic illustration of exactly where Congress is directing federal spending – and the ability to investigate whether the earmarks address pressing needs, favor political contributors or are simply pure pork. The site also has a list of “insanely useful websites” for tracking government spending and decisionmaking. Highly recommended.

The theme of the 2008 contest is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” The organizers hope to stimulate students to produce videos of two minutes or less that will “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information” and “broaden the discussion of access to scholarly research.”

The term “sparky” is derived from SPARC, the acronym for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a group of libraries and educators. More information about the contest can be found at www.sparkyawards.org.

To be eligible, submissions must be publicly available on the Internet on a website or in a digital repository, and available for use under a Creative Commons license. The submission deadline is November 20, 2008. The winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a Sparky Award statuette. Two runners-up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. The award-winning videos will be screened at the January 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver. The winning videos from 2007 can be viewed here.

The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

“Orphan works” are one of our richest bodies of cultural works but also one of the most legally problematic. An orphan work is a creative work whose copyright status is unknown or unknowable – the old diary found in an attic, the film of uncertain provenance, and the illustration found in an old magazine. Who owns them? It can be next to impossible to locate the copyright owners, if they are still alive. And it can be extremely expensive simply to conduct a search. Yet if you go ahead and use these works and a copyright holder suddenly materializes, you could be hit with a lawsuit and $150,000 in statutory damages.

To deal with this problem—and open up our cultural past to contemporary artists—Public Knowledge is pushing “orphan works” legislation that would allow artists to use orphan works so long as they made a diligent effort to find the original copyright owner. In the unlikely event that the original owner does emerge, the bill requires that users pay a reasonable compensation, and not exorbitant penalties.

Unfortunately, many photographers, illustrators and textile makers oppose this legislation. So it needs your help in getting through Congress. You can learn more about the Senate bill here
and the House bill here.

“Water is a commons,” Barlow said. “We must reclaim this commons from those who would treat it as a commodity.”

On any given Sunday morning in the same church, an average of 60 congregants fill the pews for worship services. When the church decided to create the Jamaica Plain Forum, they envisioned it as both a way to strengthen the church and to serve as a crossroads for important “community conversations about the great issues of our day, locally and globally.”

Early programs featured a variety of topics including local agriculture, the Iraq war, effective parenting, and preserving the neighborhood’s thriving independent business sector. Speakers included national experts and authors, but also “local heroes,” residents doing interesting work in the world. One forum was a “report back” by six local building-trades workers who spent two weeks volunteering in post-Katrina New Orleans.
In the fall, the J.P. Forum added regular documentary films and became a community viewing site for PBS’s Independent Lens series.

“There are so many remarkable documentary films that never see the light of day,” said Sarah Schwartz Sax, the coordinator of the Jamaica Plain Forum. “You either see them during the four days they are in a theater–or rent them and watch them alone in your house. We bring people together to watch and discuss these films; it is much more powerful.”

In the winter, the Jamaica Plain Forum instituted “Cheap Date Jamaica Plain” with timely speakers or movies, $5 childcare, and free popcorn. In their first year, over 3,000 people have attended 25 different talks and films.

“We’ve created a commons,” observed Schwartz Sax. “And most of what we talk about is protecting and expanding the commons.” Commons related themes have included “the commercial encroachment on children,” “climate change,” and Peter Barnes talking about his book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons.

The Jamaica Plain Forum received funding through the Unitarian Universalist denomination to assist with the development of forums around the country. They’ve identified and surveyed more than 75 existing forums at UU congregations to learn best practices. Through their Forum Organizing Project, in conjunction with the Institute for Policy Studies, they are providing technical assistance to new forums and writing a start-up manual for congregations and community associations interested in convening similar forums.

Some of the existing forums have roots dating back to the early 1830s when “lyceum” and “Chautauqua” movements led to the formation of hundreds of cultural and discussion forums, primarily in rural and small towns. Their history is woven together with popular reform movements including abolition, women’s suffrage and labor rights.

Lyceum refers to the garden of the Temple of Apollo Lyceus where Aristotle taught young Athenians. The U.S. version was established in New England, but quickly spread west in the 1840s with the expansion of the railroads. Famous speakers who traveled the lyceum circuit
included Susan B. Anthony, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison, Mark Twain and Emma Willard.

It is not surprising in the age of the instant message, there is a hunger for face to face discussion. With the easy availability of DVD films and projection equipment, there is are new opportunities to link together “bricks”—local religious congregations and community centers—and “clicks”—email contact technologies—to create new venues for topical films. And like reformers from an earlier age, authors and campaigners can plug into these emerging networks of organized forums to engage audiences and stimulate grassroots action.

“We see this network of forums as part of building a vibrant commons,” notes Schwartz Sax. “When people come together to learn, talk and act, we are strengthening what we hold together.”