Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [68]
Mascha isn’t drinking Dasani—a nonfine water—but he still has a dog in this fight, and he can’t help marginalizing the opposition. “The backlash is the green movement,” he says, “and it’s antiglobalization. They say water shouldn’t be a commodity, but why should water be free? Why is it different from food, which we also need to live, or shelter?”
The antiglobalization argument comes not from the mainstream environmental groups but from the pressure groups Food and Water Watch, which runs a “take back the tap” pledge campaign, and Corporate Accountability International. Antiglobalization groups have ideological roots in single-issue social and environmental campaigns (curbing sweatshop abuses and old-growth logging, for example). In recent years, such campaigns have converged to challenge the political power of large multinational corporations that, often by exercising free-trade agreements, are presumed to harm the environment and infringe upon human rights, local democracies, and cultural diversity.
Working to oppose what it calls “irresponsible and dangerous corporate actions around the world,” CAI has targeted Nestlé, General Electric, and Philip Morris, among other companies. In the United States, its bottled-water campaign—which taps both the environmental and the antiprivatization movements—has a multi-tiered agenda. First, it wants to demonstrate that most people can’t discern between bottled and tap water. Second, it informs the public that most bottled water is “just tap” (which isn’t, strictly speaking, true). Volunteers make their points about bottled water’s carbon footprint, its sketchier regulation, and its expense compared to tap, and then they ask individuals, and local governments, to quit buying it. Depending on the city, CAI may also ask local officials to forswear selling public water to private bottlers.
The group also pushes for water bottlers in the United States to reveal their sources, to make public their breaches in quality (so far, no takers among bottlers, although California passed a law requiring bottlers to make such information available to consumers), and to quit threatening local control of water with their pumping and bottling. This last bit, against privatization of a public resource, is too outré for most mainstream news outlets to pick up on, perhaps because it raises sticky questions of ownership and control, and it offends many Americans’ ideas about the primacy of capitalism. But while Corporate Accountability’s mission to halt corporate control of the commons might be abstract to most bottled-water drinkers, it isn’t the least bit abstract to Californians resisting Nestlé’s efforts to build a plant in McCloud, near Mount Shasta, or to Floridians who swam in Crystal Springs until Nestlé began bottling it, or to those residents of Denmark and Fryeburg, Maine, still raging against Nestlé’s boreholes and its big silver trucks.
The fate of Lovewell Pond might not interest the average person slapping down two bucks for a bottle of Poland Spring at a concession stand, but the issue of who controls water—Howard Dearborn’s ultimate struggle—may in the long run be even more important than how many barrels of oil are burned to quench the nation’s thirst. We can live without oil, but we can’t live without water.
Chapter 8
TOWN MEETING
DELAYED TWO WEEKS by a storm that blankets western Maine with fifteen inches of heavy snow, Fryeburg’s annual town meeting gets under way on the last day of March 2007. Of the seventy-eight articles on the warrant, the proposed water ordinance, number seventeen, is expected to draw the biggest fireworks. For more than a year, its substance and