Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [23]
Sarah Allen, a biologist collecting baseline data on the Wards Brook wetlands for another town-sponsored study, describes a potential cascade of effects from reduced stream flows. At the driest times of year, macro-invertebrates—creatures such as worms, crayfish, and stoneflies—could become stranded or stressed. Lose macro-invertebrates and you lose fish. “Shallow water also heats up more easily,” Allen says, which affects the growth of algae and plankton—fish food. With less flow, wetland vegetation could change—upland trees could move in and create shaded areas, and exotic species would have an easier time taking root.
Nestlé Waters’ greatest and most oft-cited defense is its aforementioned focus on sustainability. “Why would we hurt the resource if that’s what we’re selling?” goes the official line. Why would a company invest fifty-one million dollars in a bottling plant if it thought the water would last only a few years? It isn’t as if Nestlé would make its money back in that time: with slim margins, profits come from volume, over the long haul. Nestlé hydrogeologists work hard to determine the maximum amount of water they can sustainably pump from an aquifer, then adjust their pumping to 75 percent of that level.
But there’s one problem with this approach, critics say. Protecting aquifers—the underground bathtubs from which companies pump—doesn’t necessarily protect the surrounding environment. “An aquifer may contain plenty of water, but pumping from it may harm a nearby river, stream, or wetland,” Robert Glennon writes in Water Follies. According to the Sierra Club, Nestlé’s bottling operations in the United States have already degraded lakes, harmed wetlands, and lowered water tables, and its pumping continues to pose a threat to residential and agricultural water supplies.
In coastal areas, groundwater pumping by agricultural and industrial interests has allowed salt water to creep into freshwater aquifers from the sea. Elsewhere, overpumping has pulled heavy metals and other pollutants into drinking water and washed away soil or bedrock to create sinkholes—depressions in the earth’s surface sometimes big enough to engulf trucks or houses. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, more than 80 percent of the nation’s identified land subsidence, or sinking, is a “consequence of our exploitation of underground water.” In Massachusetts, groundwater pumping for municipal supplies converts parts of the Ipswich River, in the summertime, into a shallow canyon of mud. In eastern Michigan and in eastern Texas, commercial extraction of groundwater has dried up neighbors’ drinking-water wells, and in other states, reports the Michigan Chronicle, a Detroit weekly, “groundwater pumping has severely diminished lakes, streams and underground aquifers used for drinking water and to irrigate farm fields.”
Fish aren’t fairing any better: springs deliver fresh, cold, oxygen-rich water to river headwaters—trout habitat. When there’s less springwater, stream temperature rises, and fish eggs die. In New Tripoli, Pennsylvania, Nestlé withdraws up to one hundred and nine million gallons of water a year from a small mountain stream, bottling it under the Deer Park label. The withdrawals, Peter Crabb, a Penn State psychologist and member of Citizens for the Preservation of Lynn Township, says, “have devastated the stream and its plant and animal inhabitants. Where there used to be native brown trout, there are now none.” In his decision to halt Nestlé’s pumping from Sanctuary Springs in Mecosta County, Michigan, circuit