In 1998, a Canadian company got a permit to take 158 million gallons a year of water from Lake Superior and ship it in oceangoing tankers to Asia. The resulting public outrage was so great that the company gave up its right to take the water and the region's governors vowed to toughen our defenses against water exports.
In March 2005, Nestle Corporation cut a deal to take up to 250 million gallons a year of water from wells owned by the City of Evart. Most will be bottled, shipped and sold outside the Great Lakes Basin. And city officials are pleased with themselves.
But when you remove 250 million gallons of water from the headwaters of a tributary of the Great Lakes, you remove it from the Great Lakes just as surely as those Canadian tankers would have.
Nestle continues to claim that water in bottles is not the same as water in a pipeline to Texas or a tanker traveling to Asia. "It's a consumptive use." But to the ecosystem, it's "just" lost water no matter what technical term you use for it.
Posted by Dave at April 2, 2005 08:19 AM