Great Lakes for Sale: A book review

by: Eric B.

Sat May 31, 2008 at 13:00:00 PM EDT

There are two questions at the center of Dave Dempsey’s newest book, Great Lakes for Sale:  From whitecaps to bottlecaps. They are:

Why is bottled water different that bottled soda made from the same water?

What impact could failing to recognize the distinction have on the Great Lakes?

It’s a complicated case to make, and it requires Dempsey about 100 pages to fully flesh out what is meant by the public trust doctrine and why it should be applied more aggressively to bottled water. But, to simply lay things out there, it is something that we cannot allow to be ignored if we wish to prevent the lakes from apportionment and diversion elsewhere.

Supporters of the bottled water industry have attempted to get the public to ignore the basic question of who owns Michigan’s water, and have further attempted to make it seem reasonable, even normal, for someone else to simply appropriate it for their own profit.  This has been made possible largely on by ignoring the public trust doctrine. Indeed, public trust played nearly no role in the most recent court case involving Nestle.

This has been made possible only by muddying the question of what distinguishes bottled water from beer brewed from water from the same source. What is the difference?  The difference is that one is a value-added product (beer), and the other is simply bottled resource.  You’d come closer to genuine economic activity if you took bottled water, added some fruit concentrate and opened a roadside lemonade stand.

Bottled water is not itself a new thing, but mass producing it for the consumer market is.  We know that bottled water’s popularity as a consumer product is newer than the late 80s, when the state’s bottle deposit law was last expanded. Wine coolers were added at the time, but juice, iced tea, and bottled water were not. There are reasons for that.

Instead, now, water is bottled and sold in mass quantities. As Dempsey’s book notes, this led the city manager for the city of Evart to favorably compare water to the white pine tree.  What the city manager missed was the punch line, which is that Michigan’s lumber barons helped to inspire conservationism through the way they denuded the state; and what primarily drives opposition to water bottling is that the same reckless exploitation could damage the state’s water resources.

Dempsey further lays out the case that this easy way we approach water bottling could ultimately be used to pry apart those things that protect the Great Lakes themselves from being sold off. If you’re wondering how NAFTA was brought into the subject, Dempsey explains how.

Great Lakes for Sale is a different kind of book for Dave Dempsey. His past works have been history that has leaned towards environmental activism.  Great Lakes for Sale is activism that borrows from history to make its case.  If you were to read his books in chronological order, the sum total message – to this point – would be:

Here are people whose work should inspire you (Rise and Ruin).  Here is something (the Great Lakes) that is in peril that many of those people worked tirelessly to protect (On the Brink).  Here is the kind of elected official required if we wish good things (Milliken).  Here is a specific issue worth agitating over (Great Lakes for Sale).  Perhaps his next book will simply be entitled, “Why do you Continue to Lay About and do Nothing?”

It is also part memoir.  Dempsey, for the first time in any of his books, explores his own role in state government as Jim Blanchard’s environmental policy adviser, and then references his time after the Blanchard years with Clean Water Action.