Water Protectors
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was swamped this week with objections to its decision to allow Nestle Waters North America to increase its pumping of water from an underground aquifer. Nestle wants to more than double its current rate from 150 gallons per minute to 400 gallons per minute. This would amount to 210,240,000 gallons of water a year being sucked out and transported by truck to their Iron Mountain bottling plant. This bottled water is shipped throughout the midwest in little plastic bottles and sold for enormous profit.
In an article about Nestle’s unprecedented effort to get control of water supplies in Maine, Nathan Wellman concluded, “Nestlé is infamous for taking water from US communities for billions of dollars in profit and then dumping the environmental costs onto the rest of society. Environmental scientist Vandana Shiva has called its practices ‘the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.’”
Nestle already taps into 50 spring water sources and aquifers across the United States. This is a tremendously profitable business, as in most cases, corporations simply purchase cheap rural lands and pump away.
According to the International Bottled Water Association in 2013, Americans drank over 10 billion gallons of bottled water, generating $12.3 billion in revenue for beverage companies. This was more than double the revenue recorded in 2000. Americans spent $18.82 billion in 2014 purchasing what comes, basically free, out of the tap.
As people become more aware of water as a public trust, to be protected for our common future, private-for-profit water companies are facing resistance.
Certainly, we in Michigan have seen the complete lack of public accountability from the Mayor’s office in Detroit to the Governor’s office in Lansing. No one should think that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality can be trusted to make a decision that protects people or the fragile eco-system on which we depend.
For more than a decade Mecosta County residents have resisted the ability of Nestle to simply take water out of the aquifer for free. Nestle pays zero to take the water out of the earth. It gets an additional $13 million in tax breaks from the State.
The obscenity of this arrangement is highlighted by the fact that all of this is happening within 150 miles of Flint, a city still dependent on drinking bottled water to survive as the State complains it has no funds to help replace lead pipes to homes and schools.
No one should be under any illusions about Nestle’s desire to make money without concern for people or the planet. They recently claimed victory over a hard fought citizen lead effort in Fryeburg, Maine. Nestle won a state Supreme Court case upholding its claim on local groundwater for the next 25 years. The deal could be automatically extended for 45 years. Protesters said,
“Contracts of this length come with an unprecedented concern in our current times. With the changes we are witnessing in our climate, increasing global water insecurity, and industry polluting freshwater resources with little accountability… corporate control over drinking water resources for profit aligns us on a collision course with local water security.”
This defeat underscores the importance of creating national, state and local protections to affirm water as a human right.
In the meantime, we should consider the efforts of water protectors in Oregon. This spring they used a ballot initiative to stop Nestle from extracting over 118 million gallons of water a year from their community. They passed a first-of-its-kind ballot measure banning the production and transportation of 1000 or more gallons of bottled water per day for commercial sale within the county. The measure succeeded by an overwhelming majority of voters. It stopped Nestle.
Only the organized power of local citizens will protect our waters now. Join the effort to protect the Great Lakes by sending you comments to the MDEQ
deq-eh@michigan.gov.
Detroit's Proposal A: It takes big hits and keeps on ticking
Tawana "Honeycomb" Petty
Although it often gets lost in the propaganda mania of election season, ballot initiatives that impact communities at a neighborhood level are equally as important. This is why so many folks are talking about Proposals A and B in Detroit.
Some pretty heavy hitters came out against Proposal A a few weeks ago and it was very telling. This is the crew that the people expect to represent their interests; the crew that we don’t expect to go against grassroots efforts. But, this year of money vs movement has been one of near daily political upheaval in Detroit.
On everything from water shutoffs to public education, grassroots organizers and community members have been left scratching their heads when political decisions are made to their detriment.
Whose voice can we count on to represent us? Who is going to stand in the gap for the least of these? Let’s recap Proposal A vs B. See the epic MetroTimes article, Getting past the heated rhetoric and talking with Proposal A’s supporters, that got it right:
It’s safe to say the spunky little ordinance never had friends in high places — but all of a sudden it’s as if the proposition had a kick-me sign on its back. It’s the clear underdog in a David-and-Goliath battle, going head- to-head with a full-spectrum campaign waged by state politicians, trade unions, public-private partnerships, both daily papers, undisclosed funders, and shrill paid advertisements boasting sky-is-falling rhetoric, all taking aim squarely, if not exclusively, at Prop A.
Now is not the time to count the community out. If we count out the grassroots organizers and community members who have stood on the frontline of struggle on everything from the water shutoffs in Detroit, to the poisoning of water in Flint, the takeover of public education and the massive displacement of Black and Brown residents through ramped up foreclosures, gentrification and blight removal, then we may as well lay down any hope for true democracy in Detroit, and in this country.
Some of us still have hope that the little people’s voices will not have screamed out for their dignity and humanity in vain. Some of us still have faith that if we organize with and for the least of these, our organizing efforts will nudge those in power to make decisions that actually represent the interest of the people.
Proposal A may be the underdog’s proposal but, as we have learned historically from many underdog stories, victory is not determined by the strength of the aggressor.
We hope to learn on November 8th in Detroit that the voices of the people of Detroit actually mean something. Listen to Reverend Joan Ross’s interview on Stateside and watch this video:
Then Vote Yes on A and No on B when you go to the polls on November 8th.