When bottled water is placed next to Coca-Cola and other sugar-laden soft drinks, it seems a positive alternative, or at least benign. But take a closer look at the process by which that small unit of ordinary water has been acquired, packaged and marketed to you – for $1.50 a bottle, say – and you begin to see how bottled water is often a deep offense against the commons.
It’s a matter of taking something that belongs to all of us, denying its ecological importance, adding some modest proprietary value and marketing sizzle, and then selling it back to us at a huge markup. Disney did this with folk classics, Big Pharma does this with federal drug research, West Publishing does this with federal court decisions, and bottled water companies now do it with water.
An egregious case in point: recent legislation that Michigan Governor Granhold signed that allows Nestle to appropriate water from the Great Lakes. As Brian McKenna reports in a remarkable article in the Columbus Free Press (April 22, 2006):
The new Michigan law allows Nestle Corporation to continue its five-year takings of up to 250,000 gallons per day and sell them at a markup well over 240 times its production cost. Nestle’s profit from drawing this water could be from $500,000 to $1.8 million per day. A key proviso is that the bottles can be no larger than 5.7 gallons apiece.
Nestle had been ferociously fighting in court to prevent Granholm from exercising her veto power against diversion, but with her acquiescence to the 250,000 limit, Nestle dropped its suit.
What makes this privatization of the Great Lakes so pernicious is the precedent it sets for future exploitation of the water by others. Under NAFTA trade rules, if another corporation decides that it wants to extract water from the lakes and send it to Saudi Arabia or any other paying client, any restrictions would be considered a discriminatory barrier to trade, and struck down. For years, there has apparently been talk about shipping Great Lakes water to the Southwest (now that it has depleted the Colorado River) or to the Far East. So will the Nestle deal prompt other companies to start demanding a right to exploit Great Lakes water? It’s unclear what could stop it.
The basic problem is the market enclosure of a primary element of nature. Once water is considered a fungible commodity, its ecological significance is considered secondary. If the Great Lakes ecosystem suffers from the over-extraction of water, well, that’s too bad – market “progress” is a higher priority. Commodifying water also means that the public’s equity interests can more easily be shunted aside. In its place, all sorts of revocable surrogates are offered up – jobs, economic development, etc. This is how a ripoff of the public’s wealth is disguised as a public service.
According to the neoliberal worldview, progress looks like this: Michigan exporting great quantities of water from the Great Lakes and importing tons of garbage from Canadians into private landfills. “Progress” simply means lots of money changing hands. The net deterioration of the ecology and the plunder of the public’s resources count for naught.
Mainstream environmental organizations are showing themselves to be either clueless or indifferent to these developments. As Brian McKenna reports, James Clift, the policy director of the Michigan Environmental Council (MEC), a coalition of about 70 environmental organizations, called the recent law signed by Governor Granhold “a huge step forward for Michigan.”
It has fallen to Native Americans to raise the fundamental issues that neoliberal politicians are too timid or ignorant to raise – namely, that the Great Lakes are not for sale. In 2002, the Little Traverse Bay tribe of Indians filed suit in federal court to prevent the Nestle project and reassert that Great Lakes water is a public trust. But the judge ruled that the tribes did not have standing to sue. I’ll let Brian McKenna tell the rest of the story:
_[Frank] Ettawageshik [head of the Little Traverse Bay tribe] fought on, telling audiences he feared, “soon there will be bus tours of the sunken ships of the Great Lakes,” if this goes forward. He calls the Lakes “the white pine of the 21st century,” referencing the logging assault which felled most of Michigan’s forests in the nineteenth century.
Angry that the U.S. and Canadian governments disrespected the tribes in its 2001 Great Lakes Charter, where tribes were treated as “stakeholders” not sovereign nations, Ettawageshik deliberated with other tribes about a response. After a while he joined John Beaucage, Grand Council Chief of the Union of Ontario Indians to form a coalition of more than 140 tribes to sign the historic Tribal and First Nations Great Lakes Water Accord.
The organization is called the United Indian Nations of he Great Lakes (UINGL) and it was officially launched in April 2005 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The location is historically significant. It was the largest gathering of Great Lakes native leaders since the Treaty of Niagara in 1764. That Treaty grew out of he Royal Proclamation of 1763 which provided all land west of the Ottawa River as Indian land.
Ettawageshik was influenced by the Water Walkers of the Great Lakes. In 2003 Indian women began journeys around the Great Lakes carrying a copper bucket full of water. They want to recall the traditional Anishnabe role of women as protectors of water, what they call the lifeblood of Mother Earth. So far they have completed treks around Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron. They begin their walk around Lake Ontario on April 29, departing from Niagara. “We’re not stakeholders but bona fide owners,” Bob Goulais, a spokesperson for the Union of Ontario Indians, told me. “The Great Lakes are not for sale.”
…Indians are at the forefront of establishing an anti-corporate discourse and movement. They were at the fore in Bolivia against Bechtel, on the march against multinationals in Mexico City, and are now are at the lead in the Great Lakes. But mainstream environmentalists typically resemble the nation’s Democrats willing to accommodate and concede, rather than stand their ground.