Big corporations want to take over water rights. They come into a town, push the locals around, pay off the politicians and take all the water. But the citizens of Barnstead, NH fought back.

… excerpted from YES magazine online:

As bottled water has become a “must have” commodity generating nearly $10 billion a year in consumer spending, corporations have descended on communities like Barnstead and set up pumping operations. They extract hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, bottle it, and ship it out for profit. Taking that much water raises the specter of lowered water tables and dry wells, infiltration of pollutants or saltwater, and damage to wetlands. The townspeople lose control of one of the necessities of life.

Barnstead residents watched as nearby Barrington and Nottingham fought to block multinational corporation USA Springs from taking their water. They saw those communities work through the state regulatory system and, after years of labor and hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs, find themselves without a remedy. Corporations, they were told, have constitutional rights that limit what regulators can do with zoning or other land-use controls.

Gail Darrell and Diane St. Germaine, another Barnstead resident, didn’t want their town to face the same expensive battle. They already had experience with the regulatory system, having worked to get the town to ban local dumping of Class A sewage sludge. Once that ban was in place, the corporations shipping the sludge simply got it reclassified as Class B biosolids, and the town was back to square one.

“That was my first introduction to the regulatory process which actually does not allow citizens to say ‘No’ to anything,” Darrell says. “All corporations have to do is change a word and they get their way.”

With the deck stacked against local control, what are citizens to do to step outside the regulatory game and take back power? Some bold communities have banned specific corporate operations, not based on regulation, but on a declaration that human beings have the right to control their local resources, and that corporations are not people and not entitled to rights the Constitution grants to humans.

Now Barnstead is walking point, the first town in the nation to ban corporate water mining within its limits.

One Town at a Time

The fight to take back power from corporations continues. Across the country in Humboldt County, California, the people passed a referendum banning outside corporations from participating in elections and declared that corporations are not recognized as people there. Blaine Township, in southwestern Pennsylvania, outlawed the destructive practice of longwall coal mining. People in Montgomery County in rural Virginia are fighting the taking of farmland to build a giant railway terminal.

These are admittedly radical steps, although, as Ruth Caplan [of the Alliance for Democracy's “Defending Water for Life” program] points out, they are being carried forward by people who are not radicals. “These are not liberals, not progressives, not activists. But they don’t want corporations to tell them how they should run their community.”

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