In Drought-Ridden California, Activists Demand Repercussions for Nestlé

Following a damning investigation by the Desert Sun last month which revealed that Nestlé had been using a long-expired permit to pipe and transport water from a national forest in drought-ridden California, activists are slamming the U.S. Forest Service’s promises to make an investigation into the company a priority.

An investigation is an insufficient consequence—and the possibility of permit renewal is downright unacceptable, activists said.

The outrage follows comments made Friday by San Bernardino National Forest supervisor Jody Noiron, who told the Sun, “Now that it has been brought to my attention that the Nestlé permit has been expired for so long, on top of the drought… it has gone to the top of the pile in terms of a program of work for our folks to work on.”

“It’s pretty amazing that the Forest Service doesn’t keep better track of its environmental permits,” Earthjustice attorney Trent Orr told Common Dreams, adding that the agency should be seriously considering not renewing Nestlé’s permits. “We are in a drought,” Orr said. “Why the Forest Service would allow that to continue to happen seems pretty strange.”

In its reporting, the Sun found that although Nestlé had long drawn water from wells that tap into springs in California’s Strawberry Canyon, the company’s permit to transport water across the San Bernardino forest expired in 1988.

Moreover, the Forest Service had not assessed the impacts of the bottled water industry on streams in environmentally fragile areas, nor has it closely tracked the volume of water being extracted, the Sun found.

“The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment,” the Sun wrote in its investigation.

Renewing Nestlé’s permit could take more than two years, Noiron said.

Following the release of the Sun‘s investigation, protesters in California shut down the entrance to Nestle’s bottling facility in Sacramento, while a petition by the Courage Campaign demanding that the corporation stop profiting from state water collected more than 135,000 signatures.