Cameron Davis Speaks on Water Resource Policy and Barack Obama

The following is the full text of remarks made recently by Cameron Davis, who has been involved with the environmental movement for 25 years as an activist, organizer and tireless organizational force, speaking in the interest of water conservation and restoration particularly as it applies to the Great Lakes. Listen here to Davis’ remarks at the Environmentalists for Obama Panel Discussion that took place in Columbus, Ohio on February 29, 2008. Or, if you’re more visually inclined, feel free to read the transcript below:

Well, I can’t tell you how thankful I am that you are here today. I flew in to Cleveland, drove down to Columbus, and I had no idea if you guys were going to turn up at all so thank you, thank you, thank you for coming. I’m not here on behalf of my organization or anyone I’ve worked for in the past. I’m really just here as an ordinary person like you who cares about the future of the country, who cares about water, air and land as our life support system. With Bob and Dan I’ve been honored to be an advisor on the Obama for America National Environmental and Energy policy team. That’s where I’ve been participating for the past year or so.

I want to tell you a little bit about the Barack Obama that I know before we launch into policy stuff. I’ve known him for close to ten years. I first met him in September of 1998. We were doing a beach cleanup at 31st Street Beach, which was part of his district as an Illinois State Senator, trying to rid the Lake Michigan coast of debris, which still is a problem. He and his wife Michelle and — they only had one daughter — they pushed their daughter up in their stroller and… the thing that I’ve always been impressed about since Day One when I met him is he is the same guy running for president now as the guy I met on that sunny September day in 1998. Since then I’ve had the honor to be able to participate in various press conferences with him, both as a State Senator and as a Federal Senator as well in Washington. I’ve always appreciated the forethought that he’s had. He’s always to me been a very earnest public servant, and you see that now coming out in his bid for presidency. So when he decided to run a year ago it was a very easy choice for me to say that I want to help him. Because he’s always shown up when I’ve asked him to show up when it’s come to beach closures because of pathogenic pollution, when it’s come to the restoration of ecosystems. You name it, he’s always been there. He’s not thought twice about it. And that’s why you start to see him show up in the League of Conservation Voters that Bob mentioned before, and doing so well.

But behind the guy is a lot of good policy thought, and I’m going to talk a little bit about water. That’s my expertise. Barack Obama has been a good friend of what it takes to restore our watersheds in this country. Let’s face it: whether you’re in chemistry or whether you’re studying ecology, whether you simply like to get out for a hike, a lot of this isn’t just about doing the right thing to do. It really is a matter of necessity on this planet. You don’t have to be an economist to see that our supply of fresh water in this world is basically stable. It’s steady. It doesn’t go up, it doesn’t go down, you can’t create water artificially. Whereas the demand for water is going up all the time. All the time. So you don’t have to be an economist to see that’s a recipe for tension, unless you’re very careful about how you deal with those finite natural resources. Water is the next oil for that reason. It’s a resource that we have to care about, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because we need it for life. And it’s only going to get more expensive to treat it and to care for it unless we’re very, very careful about how we deal with it.

He’s done a number of very important things. In December he signed a pledge, he was one of three candidates to sign a pledge that he was going to protect the Great Lakes. Now why do we care about the Great Lakes here in Columbus? We care because the Great Lakes constitute 95% of the nation’s fresh surface water, 20% of the world’s fresh surface water. Think about that for a second. Water’s a finite natural resource, and we don’t have a lot of it, and we have increasing demand. Ohio is a Great Lakes state. Ohio borders Lake Erie, part of that 95% of fresh surface water that we have in this country. So restoring this ecosystem is incredibly important. And when I talk about restoring it, I’m not talking about putting it back to pre-settlement conditions. I’m talking about setting a new standard of care for our life support systems like the Great Lakes. It’s no longer about simply trying to prevent more damage. That’s kind of what our standard of care has been up until now. It’s “How can we keep things from getting worse?” That’s the wrong standard of care. The right standard of care is, “How can we have a restorative effect on our life support systems? How can we bring them back to health?” If you think about your own personal health, you don’t wake up every day and say, “Well, gee, how can I keep my personal health from getting worse?” You want your personal health to get better. And water, air and land are very much like that, and our policies have to reflect that standard of care. So he signed a pledge about two months ago saying that as president, he was going to help restore the Great Lakes by making sure we have adequate investments that go into those restoration activites, by making sure the right leaders are place so that the right decisions are made to help restore those aquatic ecosystems. You know, it’s not just a matter of putting out a book of good rules and regulations. You have to have good leadership.

He’s been very strong on something called the State Revolving Fund, which speaking of investments all our cities need. We all have, in many of our towns and cities, sewage treatment plants. We all have drinking water management needs. Well, what happens if you don’t adequately invest in those infrastructure areas? If you don’t invest in them they won’t take care of us, and we have for a long long time not been investing in those infrastructure needs in the way we need to. We have seen now the proposed budget come out of the White House for fiscal year 09, which drastically undercuts the funding needed, the investments needed in these areas. Senator Obama has always been an avid supporter of juicing up that State Revolving Fund so that states and municipalities have the funding they need to take care of those infrastructure needs. Very, very important.

Another thing that’s very important is water conservation. Now, a lot of us don’t tend to think of water conservation that much. We haven’t needed to. But it’s coming. Just like when you try to flip off that light switch when you leave your home to conserve energy and bring your energy bills down, we’re at the point where we need to do that for water, too, for the very reasons I started out with. Not only will water conservation help you and your water bills, but it will also help conserve these supplies of fresh water that we so desperately need for drinking, for irrigation, for manufacturing, for jobs in this state, all of those things. But here’s the other hidden benefit that you don’t hear anybody talking about right now: if you take a look at how municipalities use their energy, in some instances up to 30% of their energy needs are to move water from one place to another. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that, to move water from one place to another. Just pick up a gallon of water some time at a grocery store, then pick up two or three. That’s heavy stuff! That’s why it takes a lot of energy to move water. It takes a lot of energy to treat water, both when it’s coming in for you to drink and when it’s being discharged after it’s been used. It takes an incredible amount of energy. So one of the things that we need to be doing in this country is conserving water. If you conserve water, you cut down your energy needs, which helps bring some of the benefits you heard Bob talk about before. We reduce greenhouse gases, those kinds of things.

One of the things that Senator Obama has done is say that he would be in favor of working with states and municipalities to develop a national water conservation plan. Very, very important, because the time is coming when water will be the next oil. We will have to take care of it much better than we do now, and think with that adequate planning, with that adequate forethought, you’ll start to see that we’ll begin to push our way through some of the problems that are coming when it comes to water resources.

I’m not going to go on and on. As a former law school teacher, I know how hard it is to be lectured at. So I’m gonna shut up, but I will tell you this: for me there is one thing that is incredibly important about his candidacy, and that is you can have all the good policy in the world, but unless you have good leadership that policy doesn’t mean a whole heckuva lot. One of the things that’s always impressed me about him is his ability to bring people together. As an environmentalist about to pass his 25th year being an environmentalist in the near future, one of the things I’ve learned time and time again is that we’ve got to reach and preach beyond the choir. We’re great at talking amongst ourselves in the environmental community. One of the things that Senator Obama is very good at is bringing new people into the mix, and I think that’s what it’s going to take, not just when it comes to environmental policy, but economic policy, foreign relations policy, and the list goes on and on.

Davis was not the only environmental authority to speak on behalf of Barack Obama on February 29. We’ve also podcasted and posted the transcript of former EPA administrator Robert Sussman’s remarks at the same event, and we also have available the voluminous thoughts of Dan Martin, an expert straddling the worlds of political science and environmentalism, particularly on the issue of biodiversity and its geopolitical consequences. A podcast and transcript of the Q&A session that followed will be posted to Irregular Times soon.