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FLOW the Film and Water Action Workshop Celebrate Taking Back the Tap in Portland, Maine

A few Saturdays ago, water-conscious folks turned out to the movies for a world tour of our planet’s deepest crisis – water.  FLOW: For Love of Water has been screening in cities coast-to-coast, and this month Portland residents caught the eye-opening film at Movie at Exchange.  The evening showing was followed by a Q&A session with City Councilor Dave Marshall; Bowdoin Campus Coordinator Abriel Ferreira; SOH2O water activist Jamilla El Shafei; and local Take Back the Tap representative Amy Dowley. Moviegoers learned about local struggles over water and how to join a movement to protect our most essential resource and keep water clean and safe into the future.

This summer, the Portland City Council, Peace Action ME and local restaurants endorsed a resolution to take back the tap in support of funding for public water systems.  Communities across the state have been mobilizing to protect local groundwater supplies from water mining by the Swiss conglomerate Nestlé, with local bottling brand Poland Spring intent on expanding operations. Local grassroots battles erupting in Fryeburg, Shapleigh and Wells contextualize the global freshwater crisis for the people of Maine and are just the stuff Salina’s film, FLOW, unveils cinematically.

Adopt a Restaurant to Take Back the Tap and pledge to serve local Portland water.

Before the Saturday showing, we encouraged movie-goers to quench their thirst (and satisfy their appetites) at a favorite Take Back the Tap establishment before the flick and to show their support for clean, public drinking water. Participating establishments include Norm's East End Grill; Norm's Bar and Grill; Downtown Lounge; Local 188; North Star Café; and Ruski's.

Water enthusiasts ready to get their feet wet joined Food & Water Watch in a half-day workshop on Saturday in downtown Portland to adopt a restaurant and invite Portland eateries to Take Back the Tap. At this time of year as we celebrate giving to others, water activists are ramping up outreach to local businesses, urging them to join eateries coast-to-coast to champion the water movement – supporting local community water by pledging to eliminate bottled water from their menus.

After the training session, participants ventured into Portland proper to ask their favorite establishments to stop sales of non-carbonated bottled water and actively educate customers about the importance of sustaining healthy water supplies and supporting public water systems.

Three new restaurants happily signed on to support Portland city tap water: Bull Feeney's Irish Pub, Tandoor, and Shays Grill Pub.  We welcomed the new pledges and hope to see more restaurants leading the movement by the new year.

Every year, about two million tons worth of PET plastic water bottles get trashed, clogging up our national landfills.  Our restaurant outreach highlights that serving tap reduces needless garbage and aligns businesses with a new wave of "Go Local" socially and environmentally conscious products and services. From Ithaca's Moosewood to San Francisco's Incanto to Portland's very own North Star, serving tap has become a signature of good customer service and eco-friendly dining.

In the war against waste, the battle against plastic bottled water is on the frontline.

Nothing epitomizes unnecessary waste more than the plastic bottle that brings you the same liquid as your kitchen sink, for 10,000 times the price. However, it is heartening to know that bottled water sales are down in the US, attributable at least in part to increased consumer knowledge of the environmental impacts.

Some point to the economic downturn as the sole cause of decreased bottled water sales, but Nestlé—one of the largest bottled water producers—released a statement linking the sales slump to “perceived environmental issues” around bottled water. Additionally, PepsiCo and industry analysts acknowledged “consumers are increasingly choosing tap water over other beverages at restaurants and at home to help save money and the environment. Furthermore, research done by analysts at Morgan Stanley found that “23 percent [of consumers] say they are cutting back on bottled beverages in favor of tap water or beverages in containers that create less waste.”

In recent years, many consumer advocacy and nonprofit organizations have launched campaigns to educate consumers about the massive waste and environmental damage caused by plastic bottles. Production consumes energy and emits toxic chemicals, transportation requires oil, generating pollution, and finally disposal essentially amounts to littering, with 86% of all bottles put in the garbage instead of the recycling.

So it is encouraging to hear global bottled water corporations recognize that consumers are increasingly choosing to drink tap water over bottled. However, too often those realizations are followed by statements like the one made by Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s chief executive, declaring that “revitalizing this [bottled water] business is a huge priority for us.” Considering what is at stake – nothing less than the health of the global environment – it is imperative that we do not allow the bottled water corporations to achieve their goal.

Spoiler Alert

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, everybody’s favorite secret agent, James Bond, fought villains like Dr. No, an evil scientist out to sabotage U.S. missile tests, and Mr. Big, a Soviet agent using pirate treasure to finance espionage in America. But as Bond’s friend Mathis tells him in Quantum of Solace, “When one is young, it’s easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. As one gets older, the villains and heroes get all mixed up.”

The reference is to a shady new Bond villain, agent of the Quantum organization – Dominic Greene. In public, Greene is a leading environmentalist whose organization, Greene Planet, buys up large tracts of land for ecological preserves. But behind the scenes, Greene has another agenda. As he says to his co-conspirators, “This is the most valuable resource in the world and we need to control as much of it as we can.”

The film makes a number of plays on the assumption that the resource in question is oil – but oil is so…twentieth century.

By the time Bond has pursued Greene from Italy to Haiti, from Haiti to Austria, and crash-landed his plane in a sink-hole in the high, barren desert of Bolivia, we make the discovery that this vital resource is – surprise! – water.

Colluding with Greene is a cast of evil characters taken straight from the history books. We have General Medrano, the ex-dictator of Bolivia, to whom Greene says, “You want your country back? My organization can give it to you.” We have the U.S. Ambassador, myopically sticking to the familiar program: “Okay, we do nothing to stop a coup, and you give us a lease to any oil you find.” And we have the British foreign office, continually wrangling with M15, Bond’s spy agency. When Bond’s boss, M, tells him that Greene is not an environmentalist but a villain, the foreign Minister says, “If we refused to do business with villains, we’d have almost no one to trade with.”  Ain’t it the truth.

The fact that Quantum of Solace makes water the villain’s object of greed, replacing oil, gold, diamonds, and mutually assured destruction, is telling of the point we’ve reached. More telling still is the fact that our villain’s cover has him acting as an environmentalist, the ultimate corporate greenwasher. The fact that the action winds up in Bolivia – the country where, in real life, both Bechtel and Suez have tried and failed to take control of community water resources during and shortly after the reign of former-dictator-turned-neoliberal President Hugo Banzer – brings the plot frighteningly close to reality.

If only the water movement had a few organizers with the physique, the gadgets, and the, er, style of Bond. While we have many great documentaries telling the story of the global water wars, including this year’s Flow and Blue Gold, one is forced to wonder if 007 does a greater service to the water movement than even our most highly talented documentarians. After all, who better than Hollywood to characterize the greenwashing corporate water profiteers as straight up evil, sans the need to justify the hyperbole?

Matieu Amalric, the actor who played Dominic Greene, wanted to wear make-up for the role, but director Marc Forster “wanted Greene not to look grotesque, but to symbolize the hidden evils in society.” Similarly, the original screenplay had Greene having some “hidden power.” But in the final cut, the director seems to have decided that corporate power was power enough.

One wonders if Dominic Greene – had he not died drinking motor oil to quench his thirst in the Bolivian desert – might give the keynote speech at the upcoming World Water Forum in Istanbul. After all, the World Water Council that puts on the forum is presided over by Loïc Fauchon, a former executive at one of the French subsidiaries of Suez, the world’s largest private water corporation.

As we learn from the WWF website, “One of the benefits of joining the WWC is the Council's ability to influence decisions related to world water management that affect organizations, business, and communities.” Perhaps their secret meetings will also be attended by executives of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose recent partnership with Coca-Cola aims to help the global soft-drink giant become “the most efficient company in the world in terms of water use,” with “every drop of water it uses…returned to the earth or compensated for through conservation and recycling programs.” And, with this blending of fact and fiction, it would hardly be surprising to find Greene’s signature on the CEO Water Mandate, which has companies with such devastating environmental track records as Dow Chemical, Shell Oil, Unilever, and Nestle pledging to “help address the water challenge faced by the world today.”

When M, Bond’s overweening boss at M15, finds out about Quantum, she demands, “What the hell is this organization, Bond? How can they be everywhere and we know nothing about them?”

Well, my darling M, the answer is simple: like transnational corporations, and like the large NGO’s that work with the private sector to reform its practices and green its reputation, and like the International Finance Institutions whose interests are increasingly endangering the United Nations’ mandate to defend and protect human rights, they can be everywhere because their particular form of villainy works best when hidden in plain sight.

Thankfully, the world’s water is safe, because, behind the scenes, secret agent 007 is on the job.

-Jeff Conant
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