Bottled water boycott: an idea whose time has come
by Dave
Dempsey
Lansing City Pulse
The
late sp-ring heat is on, and it’s more tempting than ever to stride
into the nearest convenience store and plunk down $1.25 for a bottle
of ice-cold water.
Think again. Do you know where your bottled water is coming from?
A local activist, Mary Lindemann of East Lansing, thinks it’s time
we all reflected on that — and stopped buying a product literally
draining Michigan’s future away. She’s begun organizing a local
campaign to boycott the Ice Mountain label of bottled water. A
product of the global giant Nestle, the Ice Mountain label takes up
to 210 million gallons per year of its water from both shallow
springs and deep aquifers in Mecosta County, about 100 miles
northwest of Lansing. It’s been the subject of a fierce court
struggle between a grassroots organization, the Michigan Citizens
for Water Conservation and Nestle.
The people won an historic first round when Mecosta County Judge
Lawrence Root issued an injunction against Nestle’s spring water
pumping last November. But Nestle won a stay of the judge’s order
and the case is now headed to the state Court of Appeals.
Lindemann says her “perspective is Tribal. We don’t own anything, we
just borrow it while we’re on Earth. In a Tribal planning model, we
plan for the next seven generations. Therefore, diverting water from
the Great Lakes ecosystem for profit now, in this generation, is
incongruent with Tribal thinking.”
To bring the issue to public consciousness and to hit Nestle where
it hurts — in the profit margin — Lindemann is organizing citizens
to seek boycotts of Ice Mountain by local units of government and
consumers. Lindemann’s initiative is courageous and overdue. She is
correctly working to defend our most abundant, vital and vulnerable
resource.
Terry Swier, one of the sparkplugs of Michigan Citizens for Water
Conservation, thinks boycotts can work even if they don’t
immediately thwart irresponsible corporate behavior. Twenty years
ago, she says, while living in Spain, she boycotted Nestle because
of its predatory marketing of infant formula in developing
countries, replacing nutritious breast milk and damaging the health
of thousands of babies. Now she’s doing it again.
“Before I write my grocery list, I sit down with my list of Nestle
products to boycott and make sure I don’t buy any Nestle products,”
Swier says. “I have to keep penciling in other products, because
Nestle keeps acquiring companies. I don’t know what one person’s
impact on Nestle is, but I get personal satisfaction in knowing one
less package of cookies has not been sold because of me.”
The citizens’ group has already won endorsements of its boycott by
the West Michigan and Detroit Conferences of the United Methodist
Church. Lindemann hopes to add mid-Michigan’s institutions and
governments to the list.
Why? Because, despite the claims of its well-paid marketers and spin
doctors, Nestle’s water bottling operation in west Michigan is not
just another water use. It is one thing to use water as a process
material in making a car or beer, and another to sell water itself,
especially outside this region. “This is the first time in Michigan
that any sizable quantity of water is being commercialized and sold
as a product, rather than being used as a resource,” says Chris
Shafer, a Cooley Law School professor who teamed with noted
environmental litigator Jim Olson to make the citizens’ group’s case
in last year’s historic trial.
Consider that carefully. The very resource that defines the Great
Lakes State — water that ultimately flows into the lakes — is a
product sold, in some cases, far from the Great Lakes. It’s a
dangerous precedent.
If we’re willing to sell our water to other regions in bottles, how
are we going to say no when our surrounding states ask for it in
pipelines? Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin recently confirmed what many
already knew: Wisconsin, like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, has
designs on Great Lakes water to meet the needs of sprawling
communities within their borders but outside the Great Lakes Basin.
Nestle is rushing to identify more water sources in Michigan,
further exploiting a huge gap in our state’s water protection
framework. Unlike most neighboring states, we have no law setting
limits on how much water a corporation can take from our lakes or
groundwater. In a recent Detroit Free Press op-ed, former Department
of Environmental Quality Director Russell Harding likened proposed
water conservation legislation to “hysteria.” He failed to mention
that the governor he served, John Engler, signed in 2001 an
interstate agreement committing Michigan to passing such a law. Was
Engler being hysterical? At least until the legislature passes a
strict water conservation law, Nestle must be halted. Lindemann says
if water export can’t be prevented, the state ought to at least
charge a high premium on it, as is done to oil and gas withdrawals
where the state owns mineral rights. Nestle is currently charged
nothing for its extraction.
Just over 100 years ago, Michigan’s so-called leaders thought our
forests were inexhaustible. They resisted any controls on the lumber
barons. The result was a devastated wasteland across the northern
two-thirds of Michigan. It took generations to repair the damage.
Today’s so-called leaders think our water is inexhaustible.y Let’s
not make the same mistake twice in the state’s history.
--
Dave
Dempsey is the policy adviser for the Michigan Environmental
Council, a coalition of environmental organizations. His column
appears biweekly.
|
