From Pearl Rains-Hewett
Posted 11/6/2012
THE WA STATE DEPT OF ECOLOGY HAS DONE THIS IN SKAGIT COUNTY
This video is about the atrocities happening to the 6000 farmers and rural landowners DENIED WATER in the CLOSED Skagit River watershed.
One couple on this “JUST WATER Alliance Video has owned and paid taxes on their retirement property in Skagit County for 25 years.
They were DENIED a building permit because they were DENIED WATER.
Pearl Rains Hewett
JustWaterAlliance.org
Published on Oct 1, 2012 by jeremy smith
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMdVUk-ApqA
Learn the Truth about Water and Greed in the Skagit River Watershed
This video is about the atrocities happening to the 6000 farmers and rural landowners in the CLOSED Skagit River watershed.
Secret meetings between Swinomish tribe and WA State Dept of Ecology
DENIED PRIVATE farmers and rural landowners WELLS have a recharge rate of 50 to 80%.
The city of Anacortes sold Tethey bottling works 5 million gallons of SKAGIT RIVER WATER a day with a ZERO water recharge rate, 5 million gallons of water a DAY leaving the CLOSED Skagit River watershed FOREVER.
Please note the local, Clallam County tribes that are attempting to create instream flow in our rivers using the appointed WA State Dept of Ecology.
Below are ways to protect Clallam County rivers from water bottlers.
read on if you are interested
Pearl Rains Hewett
Jefferson County, North Florida approves landmark ordinance protecting Wacissa River from water bottlers
By Brett Ader | 09.29.11 | 10:50 am
Citizens in North Florida marked a pivotal victory earlier this month with the adoption of a law designed to ensure the Wacissa River and surrounding public waters are protected from private water bottling interests for generations to come.
On Sept. 15, 2011 the Jefferson County Commission voted unanimously to approve the Aquifer Protection Ordinance, which requires four out of five county commissioners to approve any consumptive use permits requested by companies seeking to withdraw water for commercial use. Previously, the authority to issue such permits resided with laypeople at the Suwannee River Water Management District, with no accountability to the local community.
Although the Jefferson County ordinance may represent a small step toward protecting public waters from private interests, the move follows a national trend of communities pushing back against water bottlers and Nestlé in particular. The company has earned a notorious track record for backroom dealing and empty promises of economic stimulus, environmental stewardship and job creation.
“Companies like Nestlé are really working to try to convince us that the only place to get safe drinking water is from a $4 plastic bottle, and it really builds a huge market here in the U.S. to cast a doubt on our public water system,” says Kristin Urquiza, director for Corporate Accountability International’s Think Outside the Bottle campaign. “As a result, it’s really created something that 30 years ago didn’t even exist.”
“When it comes down to how they actually get access to the rights of water, there have been a lot of examples of these backroom deals that go very quickly through either a particular city councilor, or a particular individual such as in Wacissa,” Urquiza says. “There was a piece of land where it seemed like Nestlé had gained access through a private stakeholder. And because they are the world’s largest bottler they have for all intents and purposes compared to small communities like Wacissa unlimited resources to look through, get a lay of the land, and create a strategy to promise jobs that don’t actually pan out, or economic stimulus that doesn’t actually pan out to what the community wants.”
Urquiza goes on to detail other communities her organization has worked with to successfully repel efforts by Nestlé to usurp water rights from communities without their knowledge or approval.
“Another community we worked with recently was McCloud, Calif., which is a really small town, a little bit larger than Wacissa at the base of Mount Shasta,” Urquiza says. “A major source of their income is from tourism, and Nestlé was proposing to establish the world’s largest bottling facility within the community. It was a situation where the town was not given advance notice before there was already a process started to give a 50-year contract to Nestlé to have the rights to actually start bottling in the community. To make matters worse, the 50-year contract had an automatic 50-year renewal attached to it, so it would have been a 100-year lease to the town’s water rights.”
According to Urquiza, “in 2009, folks in Shapleigh, Maine, came together to pass a rights-based ordinance curbing corporate control of water. The people of Shapleigh, as well as the local environment, have priority access to water, which basically made it impossible for bottling to happen, and there have been a lot of issues with Nestlé in Maine.”
“We [also] worked really closely with community groups in Mecosta County, Mich.,” Urquiza says. ”This is another very interesting story, where Nestlé started a bottling operation and it had already been up and running and the local townspeople began to notice that the water levels were changing in their river, and after some investigation they discovered there was a bottling plant. One citizen ended up filing a lawsuit against Nestlé to cap their amount of bottling that was happening, and like the folks in Wacissa they established Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation. MCWC was in a nearly 10-year legal battle to cap the water bottling in Mecosta at levels that would not affect the local ecosystem. That is a really great example of how Nestlé is not afraid of taking a small community and stringing them along. But luckily they were able to defeat Nestlé and put a cap on the amount of bottling that was happening.”
“There are a lot of ways in which communities can approach their local water rights, and it’s really exciting to see all these different models happening, whether its directly challenging the corporations, working within their city council, or establishing ordinances,” Urquiza says. “I think this is going to continue gaining momentum as more and more small towns are really seeing the impact that bottling has not only on their local ecosystem but also in how Nestlé’s promises just don’t add up.”
Uploaded by jacquelinemaxine on Nov 26, 2009
Excerpt from the movie “Flow” (http://www.flowthefilm.com/) that covers Nestle’s exploitative WATER business practices in rural Michigan.
Uploaded by theendgame984 on Aug 9, 2011
Irena Salina’s award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century – The World Water Crisis.
Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.
Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question ‘CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?’
Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.
http://www.flowthefilm.com/