From Guest Blogger Cameron Atwood: Thirsty for Justice?

Chairman and former CEO of the Nestlé Group, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, described “declaring water a public right” as an “opinion” and “an extreme solution” that “NGO’s” fostered. He stated that he believes the “better” “opinion” is that “water is a foodstuff like any other” and “should have a market value.” Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is also on the board of ExxonMobil.

Frank Popoff, former CEO of Dow Chemical said, “Air, water, and land are not the ‘free good’ our society once believed. They must be redefined as assets, so that they can be efficiently and appropriately allocated.”

In every instance where it bares its grasping claws, this kind of warped mindset needs to be identified, widely spotlighted and plainly illustrated as the signature of a damaged psyche. As a result of experience over millennia with instinctive sharing, and making their lives within the Public Commons, “primitive” societies were once baffled by the strange idea that one could lay a personal claim on something nature provides for everyone, and they properly regarded the desire to possess more than one needs as the symptom of a psychological and spiritual disease.

Water is not a product or a choice people can make. Water is crucial to all life, and – even more precious, and far less plentiful – potable water is a resource without which each and every one of us would die in about three days’ time.

We’ve already allowed entities like ExxonMobil to convince us that they should be allowed to extract some of the most dangerous fossil energy resources for their own personal profit, and to externalize upon the whole populace and the biosphere many of the grimmest costs of the extraction and the resulting use of those filthy energy resources. This grotesque error in public judgment now threatens the sustainability of our civilization and the stability of our climate, and we cannot allow it to continue (much less to repeat with an even more vital resource).

It’s interesting to note that, in a nation with a huge population where traditional lifestyles and values have not passed wholly into history, the power of common ethics is still capable of trumping the power of corrupt influence. Largely through a groundswell of public protest, a Coca-Cola plant has been at least temporarily shut down in Kerala, India, after over-exploitation and pollution of the local groundwater were demonstrated.

The people there sited M C Mehta vs. Union of India 2004(12) SCC118, the Supreme Court of India recognized that: 1) Groundwater is a social asset; 2) Citizens have the right to the use of air, water and earth as protected under Article 21 of the Constitution (the protection of life and personal liberty); 3) The environmental balance is to be maintained and wherever groundwater is required for domestic and agricultural needs, priority is to be given to these.

This sounds like the most basic logic and justice – yet I wonder what decision might emerge from our own Supreme Court on such a question. The matter remains contested in Canada.

It’s not enough that Nestlé merely be prevented from drawing too much public water during times of drought in Ontario. Nestlé, Coca Cola – and all other resource privateers – must be permanently barred from commoditizing potable water in any quantity anywhere in the world. The same must be said of all other natural resources.

The deception and folly of corporate greed-heads like Peter Brabeck and Frank Popoff must be countered with fierce public campaigns leveled against their smallest foothold in the Public Commons.

This much should be obvious: We can’t allow con artists to take from us what is ours, and then gather the fruits of our labor in return for giving our property back. That’s theft and extortion, plain and simple.