It’s never easy dealing with a multinational corporation.

If you took all the legal and media resources in my thinly populated county and piled them atop each other, they’d still look like an anthill among Nestle’s Himalayan resources.

After all, every time I research Nestle’s latest half-truths and misleading statements issued by their hordes of PR, legal and operative staff—whose paid job it is to generate this rubbish–I lose money and waste time.

Yet here I am, writing another Nestle post. Why?

Because their operative tried to gas me. People can disagree about outcomes and philosophies, but this guy yanked my chain, assuming I was too stupid or lazy to check.

Guess what? I’m neither.

Nestle Misleading Statement #1:

From Nestle’s Operative:

“Ice Mountain in Michigan has been in operation since 2002 and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), which regulates our facility, has not found any negative impact on the surrounding environment.”

The Mecosta Springs plant in Michigan (Ice Mountain is Nestles’ water brand in Michigan) was the subject of a lawsuit by the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC).

In November of 2003, Judge Lawrence Root ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered Nestlé to cease all pumping from the aquifers in question within 21 days.

Chicago’s Conscious Choice Web site quoted the decision:

Activists lauded Root’s 68-page decision, which detailed the harm the pumping is causing to streams and ponds in the area and lambasted Nestlé for trying to mislead the public and for obtaining permits based on reports that “even the defense now admits were inaccurate, incomplete or otherwise flawed.”

Nestle ultimately sought an emergency injunction which stayed the pumping halt while the appeal worked its way to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Later, MCWC and Nestle reached an agreement that allowed Nestle to continue pumping less than half the 500,000 gallons per day they had been taking.

So while it’s true that Michigan’s MDEQ agency hadn’t found fault with the project, a judge did, and Nestle’s right to pump water out of those springs has been cut by more than half.

One activist cut right to the chase about the decision:

“Nestlé must be shocked,” she said. “I’m sure they’re used to getting their way. They have tons of lawyers, we have one; they have millions of dollars, we’re in debt. But the judge decided to do the right thing.”

The case has worked its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, where the issue doesn’t revolve around the damage done by Nestle’s aggressive pumping, but whether the citizens group was entitled to bring suit in the first place.

It’s an end-run around the real issues, but it’s the kind of legal cha-cha that corporate lawyers excel at.

Should Nestle prevail in Michigan, corporations could do pretty much as they please, and even neighboring landowners would get to sit and watch their ponds, streams and wetlands dry up—without legal recourse.

Still, there is little debate about the core of the issue; Nestle pumped too much water from Mecosta Springs and significantly degraded the downstream environment.

It’s a far cry from the statement that Michigan had “not found any negative impact on the surrounding environment.”

Don’t Just Deplete the Aquifer. Damage it Too.

Nestle’s real concern for water resources becomes clear once you examine the contract.

Not content with the water they can steal from readily available resources (Nestle has rights to 1,600 acre feet of McCloud city water and unlimited groundwater), Nestle plans to drill into the aquifer itself, which geologists know is a dangerous game to play.

From the SF Chronicle’s online site:

And although most of the bottled water will come from excess flows into the town’s water system, some opponents worry about the plan to bore into the aquifer to collect even more.

“The problem is that this is a fractured aquifer, with cracks running every which way,” said Debra Anderson, chairwoman of the McCloud Watershed Council, a group opposed to the project.

“You really don’t know what large-scale drilling will do. People around here have sunk their wells too deep and they lost all their water — it disappeared like it was going down a bathtub drain.”

Our Nestle operative contends that Nestle would never damage the aquifer since it makes money from it, but heck, they’re going to drill anyway.

In addition, he expresses no such concern for the zero-profit-producing downstream habitat, saying only that the EIR and CEQA (California’s environmental review law) would study and mitigate any impacts, and the damage would be less than when the timber mill (where the bottling plant will be located) was operating.

You’ll notice the difference. I sure did.

Nestle doesn’t stand to profit from trout, so they don’t give a crap. “We’re not as bad as the business that went under years ago” isn’t exactly a ringing statement of concern.

Of course, the gambit might just pay off for them; the draft EIR is a mess, and Nestle’s intention in that process seems clear.

In fact, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s post, where we’ll dig our way through the Nestle-generated bullshit to uncover Misleading Statement #2 and also Nestle’s attempt to undermine the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process by providing a vague, non-specific and even contradictory project description to the agency generating the document.

I also promise some actual fishing news real soon.

After days of warm, spring-like weather, we’re looking at a pair of storms, which could be my signal—despite a fairly high river—to run downstream and wait in vain for a BWO hatch which will never happen.

Don’t miss it. See you at the keyboard, Tom Chandler.

[tags]nestle, mccloud, water, mccloud river, [/tags]

Posted in Environment, Opinion.