Putting a cap on the bottled water industry by Amy Vickers

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OVER A half-billion dollars of Massachusetts' taxpayer money will be spent this year on clean drinking water program loans to communities, yet Beacon Hill has been strangely silent about - and invested not one penny in defense of - small- and often low-income rural towns that stand alone against what many see as a threat to their drinking water supplies: Swiss-based Nestlé Waters.
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Two recent efforts by Nestlé to pursue pumping operations in small towns illustrate why withdrawals for commercial water bottling operations in our state pose unacceptable risks, not only to local drinking water supplies, but also to such natural assets as fisheries and conservation land. Last summer, Montague residents halted - at least for now -Nestlé's pursuit of the spring water beneath Montague Plains, a state wildlife management area that also recharges critical ground water for a state fish hatchery and the local wells on which many homes and farms depend.
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Since when has Massachusetts enjoyed a surplus of pristine drinking water supplies that multinational firms, not Bay State citizens, are considered more deserving to receive? The state classifies 70 percent of state river drainage basins as "flow-stressed." Since when have they been restored to such good health that we now have a surfeit of naturally clean freshwater ready for shipping to bottle-chugging out-of-staters - and this in an era in which we face unprecedented global warming, increased agricultural irrigation needs, and worsening water pollution, which requires skyrocketing treatment costs?

Leaders in government, business, religious, and spiritual movements across America are increasingly rejecting bottled water because of its indefensible environmental costs. It is time that this state also calls a halt to the aggressive intrusions of the bottled water industry into the vulnerable water sources that supply small-town homes, farms, and public conservation lands.

The Legislature should place an immediate statewide moratorium of at least two years on new bottled water extractions along with a cap on existing withdrawals.
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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/07/putting_a_cap_on_the_bottled_water_industry/

And I live here and this is the first I have seen about this issue.

I'm pretty rushed right now so i can't look them up, I'm sure I have them bookmarked somewhere, but it really was a clear case of criminal or at least immoral corporate actions. Essentially swindling the local people out of their own natural resources.