Putting on the ‘good neighbor’ facade

I view the donation by Nestle Waters of 1,600 cases of water to Snow Shoe area families as a cheap publicity stunt to showcase what good neighbors they will be in Centre County. This cynical ploy by Nestle and its official cheerleaders contributed less than 5918 gallons ... less than one percent of the 600,000 gallons they want permitted to pipe on a daily basis from the Spring Creek watershed.

It further galls me that the problems created for the Mountaintop Regional Water Authority by Range Resources-Appalachia LLC were addressed by the Nestle Corporation. In a sense, that food and water cartel from Switzerland is subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Range Resources should have been supplying the customers whose water supply was adversely impacted by their gas well drilling throughout the crisis all along.

Trucking bountiful water using a nonrenewable resource (oil) that will be further depleted by packaging the retail product in plastic bottles continues the energetic insanity. Plastic bottle production in the USA uses 1.5 million barrels of oil yearly ... enough to fuel 100,000 cars annually. Plastic bottles are rarely recycled ... four out of five end up in landfills ... and a large proportion ends up as litter that ultimately pollutes our oceans, causing tremendous harm to marine ecosystems.

Finally, Nestle has a horrendous corporate history of human rights abuses, labor violations and environmental outrages dating back decades that readers can easily Google. This pattern indicates they are selling us a bill of goods, not good neighbors.

This story was originally published February 4, 2018 at 6:44 PM with the headline "Putting on the ‘good neighbor’ facade."