Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [75]
While Gamwell, Warren, and Fletcher, among others, await the court’s decision, Jim Wilfong is busy working another angle. Years ago, his group, H2O for ME, had attempted, but failed, to pass a first-in-the-nation bottled-water tax. When Wilfong vows to launch a second referendum, Nestlé—perhaps feeling uneasy about which way the substantial-hardship case will go—agrees to a compromise. The company, along with Wilfong, state appointees, and other stakeholders, hammers out legislation in the state capital that requires commercial extractors to submit to stricter environmental reviews, which consider impacts on entire watersheds, a more thorough and public reviewing process of their permit applications, and subsequent groundwater monitoring paid for by companies. The deal is done well before the Supreme Judicial Court announces its decision.
“This is a real victory for democracy,” Wilfong tells me on the phone, just after the bill is signed. “It takes a big chunk out of absolute dominion.” No longer can landowners pump all the groundwater they please.
Nestlé underplays the legislation. “It’s not an appreciable change for us,” Tom Brennan says, because Nestlé already considers all the environmental impacts. (At new bottling plants, sure, Wilfong says, but Nestlé doesn’t do that for individual extraction wells.)
Wilfong believes the legislation helps clarify ownership of groundwater: “That is the big issue. Not just in Maine but around the country and around the world. As clean water grows scarce, who is going to own it, and who is going to control it? And isn’t it insane policy to let multinationals control something so important?”
The story of Nestlé in Fryeburg, then, isn’t just about Howard Dearborn’s pond, or the truck traffic from the proposed tanker station near Scott Gamwell’s house. It’s not just about whether a company is creating good Maine jobs. The story of Nestlé in Fryeburg is, in its own weird way, the story of globalization, and what this town learns about water’s ownership and control will matter to all of us as water scarcity—“the most underappreciated global environmental challenge of our time,” according to the Worldwatch Institute—begins to hit home.
Three months after Scott Anderson and Catherine Connors presented their oral arguments in Portland, the court issues its opinion. It remands the Fryeburg case, regarding the trucking station, back to that town’s planning board and orders it to consider other criteria in the town’s comprehensive plan. In the matter of Denmark, the court decides that Poland Spring will indeed suffer substantial hardship if it can’t get enough water to feed its bottling plants. The permit stands.
Anderson, who thought he had a decent shot, is crushed. (And the Reverend Ken Turley suddenly looks like a prophet for saying, months earlier, “They argue as if it were a divine right to make as much money as they can.”) “The substantial-hardship test addressed ownership and control,” Anderson says, “and now those issues don’t figure into it.” The court, in other words, punted. Now, if companies can show that not taking water will hurt their bottom line—and Nestlé can show this in every Maine town it approaches—the water is theirs for the taking.
In a philosophical mode, Anderson says, “The state legislature looks at jobs and economic benefits: I understand and appreciate that. The legislature sees this as a local issue. They’ll let it go on until it grows and becomes a problem. And it will, as the population grows. We see it already in the West, and it’s going to happen here too.”
In early autumn, Fryeburg is still simmering. Nestlé closes on the Bailey’s property, roughly forty