Ecologist Delia Malone is speaking out in no uncertain terms. In an open letter emailed yesterday, Malone criticized Nestle Waters North America water harvesting project here as unsustainable, and accuses Nestle of “contempt” for Chaffee County’s 1041 regulations and a blatant disregard for the science of climate change.
Silent since April when a final report by Colorado Natural Heritage Program was issued on the natural resource impacts of Nestle, Malone, who wrote the first draft of the report, said she wrote yesterday’s letter as a private citizen saying “it’s the right thing to say and the right thing to do, even though I’m not sure it will make a difference.”
Earlier this spring controversy erupted over the CNHP report. Between the time Malone issued CNHP’s first draft and the final report was submitted by her boss David Anderson, Nestle project manager Bruce Lauerman and local property owner Harold Hagan called CNHP discuss the draft. Hagan has an option to sell his land and water rights to Nestle, subject to county approval of Nestle’s project. Hagan is professor emeritus at Colorado State University where he has been a longtime fisheries science professor at the Warner College of Natural Resources Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology. CNHP is a non-profit organization and a sponsored program of the same CSU college and department.
Anderson explained in an email at the time, “I emphasize here that the differences between our draft and final reviews are the result of new information that became available, not the result of any communications with other project stakeholders or influence by special interests. We reviewed the materials we had at our disposal objectively and offered our conclusions based on those alone.”
When asked what prompted her to speak out now, after being tight-lipped about the final CNHP report, Malone said she was hoping the turn of events in Chaffee County would have gone differently and that the commissioners “would have taken a different path.”
Regardless of all the good, hard data out there, Malone lamented the commissioners dismissing the role of climate change in their deliberations about Nestle. Indeed, countless scientific books and research papers from all corners of the globe have written about the certainty of impending water shortages due to climate change that is already measurable. Read this related report in the Citizen.
“Accessible water is rare and for Chaffee County to just give it away is really short-sighted,” Malone said. “You can’t get it back and when you really need it, it will be too late.”
Following is the full text of Malone’s open letter to the citizens of Chaffee County.
An open letter to the Citizens and Residents of Chaffee County,
During the summer of 2008 I had the privilege to live and work in Chaffee County surveying and documenting wetland plant species and natural communities. Chaffee County indeed has a rich and varied landscape with correspondingly diverse and unique natural communities of life. From Chaffee County’s high alpine fens to high desert wetlands, water, and its availability, is the single most important factor in determining wetland versus desert, forest versus scrubland, and abundance versus scarcity. Water is our most precious resource – water makes the difference between lush agricultural fields and dried up crops and blowing soil, and between fish in the river and algal blooms and bacteria that suck life-giving oxygen out of streams.
Even seemingly small amounts of water are essential to life in an otherwise arid landscape – in the West, every drop of water is precious. Nestle Company is clearly aware of just how precious your water is – demonstrated by their willingness to cajole and strong arm their way to taking water from the Ruby Mountain springs. Now I won’t comment here on the environmental devastation wreaked upon the earth and the oceans from the disposable plastic water bottle industry except to say that the effects are heinous and far-reaching, impacting the very base of the food chain that sustains us all. I will, and have, commented on the sustainability of the proposed withdrawals of water from Ruby Mountain; in essence, I don’t believe that Nestle has shown their proposed drawdowns to be sustainable – I believe they are not.
Yes, the proposed project is impacting only one small spring in all of Chaffee County – however, the fallacy of this sort of thinking is that we discount the concept of cumulative impacts and we ignore the idea that there is an additive and compounding effect each and every time we alter natural systems such as by depleting natural spring flows. Eventually these changes add up, they accumulate, to result in environmental degradation. Now I’m not saying that the proposed Nestle project will result in environmental collapse but I am saying that it will certainly contribute to the degradation of the natural and societal communities in Chaffee County.
At best Nestle has shown contempt for the Chaffee County 1041 regulations – these regulations were established in an effort to maintain the quality of life in the County and are clear with regard to the requirements regarding the sustainability of such projects – independent professional opinions question both the methods and conclusions reached by Nestle. Nestle has also shown disregard for the science of Climate Change by brushing it aside with the statement that consideration of Climate Change is not required in the regulations. Long-term sustainability requires us to consider the impact of all of our actions to those around us and to act responsibly – in “The Tragedy of the Commons” every farmer tried to maximize his profits by grazing as many cattle as possible on the publicly owned commons – the tragedy of course is that the pasture was rapidly overgrazed and then no one profited. This Nestle proposal is a bit like that – in their quest for rapid, short-term profit they’ve shown little consideration of impacts to surrounding human and natural communities.
I wish you all the very best in preventing this small but significant tragedy –
Delia Malone, Redstone, Colorado
Thanks to Ms. Malone for telling us how it is. Can the Commissioners still disregard these views of a professional? Or are they so hellbent on writing Nestle’s 1041 proposal that they have closed their minds to the hard facts that the citizens of Chaffee County have presented to them?
Thank You Delia for stating so simply and passionately what many people realize to be true. Some of the most educated and informed experts in the field consider Water to be the Blue gold or “Oil” of the 21st. Century. I just regret that it has taken a foreign company with the despicable track record of the Nestle Corp. to wake me up to this sobering reality….
hold the commissioners responsible by starting a recall petition and replace them with green/sustainable points of view. and then take the whole case to court and fight, fight, fight, and do not give up no matter the cost. nestle is opportunistic and will not stop with just one spring, not here or anywhere else. our way of life is at stake and water IS the crucial ingredient between life and death, abundance and scarcity in this enviornment.
begin thinking and planning on a homerule charter for your county and city based on the rights of the land, air, water, animals, humans, and abandon the statute based charters which offer no protections for the elements which comprise the quality and way of life here. it is the only viable alternative and if we do not stand up for us and the environment with a homerule rights based charter you can basically kiss you ass goodbye because the environment can not be protected with a statute based system of laws. what’s at stake is democracy, the homerule type/variety which allows the citizens to have control, not the state.
I am not a scientist, but I firmly believe what is happening with Climate Change. I brought this up at one of the hearings for Nestle’ s and was totally ignored. Water is going to be the most important part of what it takes to live in the Southwest and to think of handing water over to a greedy corporation like Nestle’s is beyond comprehension! Thank you for speaking out, Ms. Malone.