Water is Life

My interest in water campaigns beyond Europe began with my connection to the Wellington Water Watchers, a group that came together in 2006 to protest Nestlé’s extraction and bottling of groundwater in their county (Wellington County, Ontario, Canada). At stake was a political battle over the fact that Ontario’s provincial Ministry of the Environment repeatedly issued permits to Nestlé, allowing it to take water from the local aquifer and to bottle and sell it all over North America.

In order to support collaborative community research projects in and around this struggle, Robert Case from the University of Waterloo and I won two SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) grants in 2020. Both were used to support the WWW, especially as they continued to work under difficult pandemic conditions.

In April 2021, Nestlé’s sold its North American bottled water operations to the private equity group One Rock Capital Partners and Metropoulos and Co. for $ 4.3 billion. The rise of this new corporate owner, Blue Triton, just like the more general rise of large private equity firms in the global water market, come with new challenges for activist groups.

I am currently working with Debjani Bhattacharya, Stefan Leins, and Madeleine Moore on building a digital infrastructure to track and communicate the financialization of water and water infrastructures to a broader public.