Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [25]
The citizens of Fryeburg didn’t know, when they first started challenging Nestlé, that they would soon be part of a growing movement, allied with angry citizens across the nation who are standing up to corporate behemoths for control of their communities. It’s an uphill struggle, because most smalltown Americans aren’t schooled in exercising their rights, and because their opponents, as Jackson says, have all the time and money in the world to press their individual agendas.
Through an accident of geology, Fryeburg is now paying the price for America’s infatuation with bottled water. But the town isn’t alone. “Everywhere there is clean freshwater, these companies are coming in,” Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project, which works to stop commodification of the world’s water, and the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest social movement, tells the audience at a talk in Albany, New Hampshire. She cites examples of multinational corporations attempting to privatize public water companies in the United States and in Latin America and of bottlers hurrying to stake water claims. As the resource becomes more valuable, water conflicts will become more frequent. Already, Barlow says, farmers in Indonesia are fighting each other with machetes over the allotment of water that Nestlé leaves behind. Outside Johannesburg, she continues, impoverished South Africans turned for drinking water to a polluted river after the French multinational Suez took control of the local water system and made the town pump available only to those who could pay.
But the news isn’t all grim. As a half-dozen Fryeburg residents listening to Barlow’s talk solemnly nod, she recounts stories of communities that rejected privatization—in Bolivia and in Uruguay, in Stockton, California, Highland Park, Michigan, and nearby Barnstead, New Hampshire, which in 2006 became the first municipal government in the United States to ban corporations from pumping water for sale elsewhere.
Fryeburg, Barlow says, “is part of the global water-justice movement.”
In 2004, a team of Nestlé geologists were combing over Maine maps, looking for new sources of Poland Spring water. They were interested in thick deposits of sand and gravel, the result of ancient glaciers melting into rivers. In this “high energy” situation, fine particles rush out to sea while coarse sediments settle on the river’s edge. The resulting layers are thick, they make excellent filters, and they’re likely to produce the sort of water that many are willing to buy. Maine has a lot of great aquifers, but not all of them have a spring at their end, produce high volumes of high-quality water, and are reasonably close to highways that lead to major markets. When the Nestlé geologists hit what looked like pay dirt in the tiny town of Kingfield, they rolled up their maps and pulled on their boots. It was time to take a walk in the woods.
It’s time for me to hit the woods too. If the argument over Fryeburg’s water is an argument over sustainability, I owe it to Tom Brennan to see how Poland Spring decides that taking X amount of water will leave more than enough behind. Brennan and his team determine pumping rates based on complicated hydrogeological models built inside computers. But the data have to come from somewhere, and so on a cold March day I drive north out of Fryeburg and keep going until I’m forty miles from the Canadian border.
Just west of Kingfield, population eleven hundred, I bump down the rutted driveway of the Howe Farm and park in a snowy field. A middle-aged man in a wool cap skis out of the woods and offers me a pair of snowshoes. A consulting hydrogeologist for Nestlé, Rich Fortin has agreed to show me the company’s newest springs, which will