Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [22]
“I dug this well myself,” he says proudly. We look inside the tiled column and duly note that the water level is low. “It’s been sucking air on and off for two weeks now,” he says. Dearborn peers at Waite and, looking as if he’d just presented a crucial piece of evidence to a jury, purses his lips expectantly. Waite nods.
In October of 2005, Elbridge Russell was driving east out of Fryeburg on Route 302 when he stopped to rescue a turtle attempting to cross the road. He thought it looked like a Blanding’s, a state-endangered species, but they’d never been recorded this far north or west. After confirming the identification with local wildlife officials, Russell returned the turtle to the roadside. It headed toward the Saco, toward safety, but suddenly one of Poland Spring’s business plans was in danger. The company had requested a permit to build a truck-loading station barely a mile down the road, where springwater pumped from the adjacent town of Denmark—105 million gallons a year—would be piped several miles and then into trucks bound for bottling plants. The turtle was a hurdle: if more of them were nearby, it could halt the project. Nestlé hired an independent contractor to look into the matter, and opponents of the tanker station began to pray for reptiles with yellow-spotted black shells.
It doesn’t surprise Stefan Jackson, director of the Saco River Project for the Nature Conservancy, that no further turtles were found. “They looked only where they were required to look,” Jackson says: the scope of the study was too limited—perhaps by design. Hard-muscled and swarthy, Jackson prowls the cramped confines of his office—the upper floor of a small Victorian house on Fryeburg’s Main Street. He pushes aside maps and publicity materials, leftovers from the Saco River Project’s booth at the Fryeburg Fair. As someone interested in the sustainability of natural systems, Jackson is focused on facts: how much water can be pumped from an aquifer without impairing the wetlands and waters into which it normally discharges. As an attorney, he’s interested in accountability. In the Poland Spring matter, he doesn’t see enough of either.
“Poland Spring says their pumping will have no impact. That’s ludicrous. Every action in this ecosystem has an impact. But is it measurable or significant? It’s no impact only because of what they chose to measure. As far as I know, they did no dragonfly-population study, no sinkhole study; they didn’t do broad macro-invertebrate studies. They looked at the hydrology but they didn’t do environmental impact surveys.” Jackson sips tea from a travel mug, long gone cold. “There are other, bigger users of the Saco’s aquifers—industry, agriculture, community drinking water. The big rub, environmentally, is whether pumping for bottled water is the straw that will break the camel’s back.”
Humans have inhabited the Fryeburg vicinity for ten thousand years, but the area is still fairly pristine, with key species of globally rare plants and animals. “What would it be like,” Jackson wonders, “if we had that yearly one hundred and fifty million gallons of water back? Would there be more Blanding’s turtles, more dragonflies, more silverling, more Scirpus longii?” The silverling is a lovely herb with tiny flowers and needlelike leaves; the Scirpus an elegant bulrush. All Jackson wants is for Nestlé to show that it cares for the area beyond its short-term financial returns. “I want them to catalog what’s out there, record their steps, be responsible. And if they discover it’s a mistake, then to acknowledge that and step in another direction.”
While Jackson talks, I devour a sandwich and try to make sense of what he’s saying. I want to know if drinking Poland Spring is like an urbanite killing and wearing a baby harp seal—that is, morally indefensible. But Jackson isn’t making the distinction easy; there’s just too much uncertainty. “It’s very clever for Nestlé to say this is a sustainable business,” he continues. “They want you