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From www.tallahassee.com/ar...

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In 2005, residents of Fryeburg, Maine, blocked construction in a residential neighborhood of a water-truck loading station that would ship water out of the area. Nestle sued the town five times, eventually landing the case before the Maine Supreme Court, where Nestle argued that the residents did not have the authority to interfere with its business practices. The Maine Supreme Court allowed Nestle to move forward with its construction plans, overturning the lower court decisions that had supported the residents.

In some cases, citizen persistence has paid off and Nestle has been forced to conform to public pressure. In McCloud, Calif., residents were able to block a Nestle deal that would have granted it unlimited access to groundwater. This effort took six years of litigation and public pressure before Nestle backed off. After a 10-year fight in Mecosta County, Mich., Nestle was forced to cut the amount it would pump in half, down to 300,000 gallons a day after a judge threatened it with an injunction that would have prevented any water extraction.

As Annie Leonard's YouTube film "The Story of Bottled Water" reminds us, bottled water is a result of "manufactured demand" — where water bottlers have sought to create fear and doubt about tap water while creating a product that is 2,000 times as expensive as tap water and pollutes the planet at every step of the production chain. Over 80 percent of the plastic bottles end up in landfills or even worse, such as in the Pacific garbage gyre, where millions of tons of plastic float in the middle of the ocean.

The Wacissa River is one of the few remaining pristine rivers in North Florida and a valuable asset for local recreation and ecotourism. Any changes to this river should be based on transparent science without political interference that places the ecological and public interests above private profit. Given the track record, local residents should prepare themselves for a long, expensive fight if they hope to defend this river from Nestle.
4 Dec 2010, 07:21 PM Reply Like