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October 19, 2005EditorialWords carry weight in Great Lakes debateThe issue: Our view: It's a slippery slope proposition, and it gives those who look 20 years down the line the jitters. For now, industry representatives who want to ensure access to Great Lakes water for their company's survival dismiss those concerns as far-fetched paranoia. So do many political observers. But many in the environmental community can easily imagine current practices, if given a legal foothold in public policy debate, expanded into worst-case scenarios. In what the Associated Press called a "compromise water protection blueprint," the National Wildlife Federation and the Council of Great Lakes Industries said bottled water would be classified as a "product" and not a diversion of Great Lakes water. The blueprint said individual states and Canadian provinces could put strict regulations on bottled water and prohibit out-of-basin exports. But the wording of the agreement raised red flags. In a very real way the debate over Great Lakes Water boils down to a battle of words. So what is Great Lakes Water? Is it surface water from the lakes themselves? It is water pumped from underground aquifers? Is it water that bubbles to the surface as an artesian well? And is that water, from whatever source, a commodity or product to be traded or sold? Is it a natural resource owned jointly by Michigan residents or those who live in the Great Lakes Basin? Nestle Waters North America Inc., which runs a bottling operation in Mecosta County, says it's none of those things - to them it's a "beverage." The agreement has exposed divisions within the environmental community over that wording and those larger fears. Environmental attorney Jim Olson of Traverse City said the agreement, as written, would "privatize a public resource." The deal came just weeks before a December deadline for a final plan on preserving Great Lakes waters to be presented to the Council of Great Lakes Governors. While the head of the negotiating team working on that statement thought the recent agreement "bodes well for building consensus," it has done no such thing among environmental interests. This is no time for a single group within the wider environmental community to speak for the whole and endorse concepts or wording that could have unintended consequences down the line. It is, instead, a time to weigh every word. Consensus means wide agreement, not a minority view, no matter who holds that minority view.
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