Friday Fun With That Zany Bunch at Nestle

Michigan Hoping to Excise Nestle

It’s never really a full week if I haven’t taken aim at One Pillar of the Axis of Evil Nestle, but this Friday I’ll let others do it for me.

First, Michigan is considering an excise tax on water bottlers. Their thinking? Pure, clean spring water is a public resource, yet companies are bottling it essentially for free (and profiting heavily).

Frankly, such an idea makes little sense without a comprehensive groundwater policy in effect, but it’s interesting to see the tide building against Nestle’s “you get bupkus, we get rich” approach to rural natural resources.

And make no mistake — this proposed legislation is aimed directly at Nestle. Nice to be loved, eh?

Meanwhile, in Canada…

Citizens of a small town are fighting Nestle, and you can read all about it at the Rabble News.

In addition, it [ed: Nestle] has placed a second request through the Environmental Registry to truck 1.1 million litres of water a day from Hillsburgh, Ont. to the bottling plant that should also last for the next 5 years.

This is Standard Operating Procedure for Nestle; they get a toehold with a plant, and then start trucking water into that plant, further degrading roads and the lifestyles in small towns. Lovely stuff.

Meanwhile, Right Here…

A letter to the Editor of the Mount Shasta Herald (not yet available online) was signed by many local businesses, and stated simply “McCloud Can Do Better.” The letter cited studies showing that large corporate businesses often destroy small town infrastructure, making it harder for local businesses to form and grow.

In addition — despite Nestle’s claims to the contrary — economic surveys show that 75% of the jobs for these kinds of plants come from outside the local area. In the last five years, fast-growing McCloud companies have created more jobs than Nestle will in ten years.

Yet many cling to the hope that Nestle is McCloud’s savior. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not Good for the McCloud River

If you think this plant can’t damage fisheries, consider the following:

• Temperatures in the Upper McCloud, Squaw Creek, and the Lower McCloud can get awfully warm in late summer
• With the purchase of the McCloud mill, Nestle owns the rights to divert 12cfs from Lakin Dam on the Upper McCloud — a sizable chunk of water on that small stream (especially in the summer)
• Add the spring diversions (essentially from Squaw Creek) and the potential for almost unlimited groundwater pumping, and the accumulated diversions can be significant

Add Nestle’s diversion to a drought year (or a series of them), and you have the making for a fishery the ghost of what it once was.

And this ignores the other bottling plants already sucking water out of the surrounding watersheds (and the watering plants that are yet to come).

Climate change? We haven’t even addressed that yet.

Think your kids will be catching fish as many fish on the McCloud 50 years from now?

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