Fighting to reclaim Maine for us
AS A native Mainer, I was happy to read Jamilla El-Shafei's piece about Nestlé's plans to seize control of Maine's water resources ("Main rejects corporate control").
This is not the first water war to take place in the Pine Tree state. Like many, my family grew up on the banks of rivers so polluted with paper mill waste that they ran brown and foamy, and stank to high heaven in the summer heat.
When I was in second grade in Russell Elementary School in Gray, we were told that pollution from the McKinn toxic dump in Yarmouth meant we couldn't drink our tap water. We spent months getting our drinking water from the back of a fire truck tanker.
Ironically, all this took place just 10 or 15 miles from Poland Spring. Although the stricter environmental controls that came in under the EPA in the 1970s led to cleaning up some of this mess (fish are back in the Androscoggin), Maine water remains heavily polluted from acid rain.
The lakes are so contaminated by mercury that the state recommends eating only one freshwater fish per year.
Activists fan out across the state every year to conduct a loon count (the birds that make the haunting wolf-like call you may have heard in the movie On Golden Pond) in a bid to keep the species alive. Loons eat fish, fish cells contain mercury, mercury makes the shells of the loon's eggs weak, the hatchlings die.
Clear-cutting continues, and developers want to turn Moosehead Lake into a weekend getaway destination for the wealthy (thankfully, the real estate crash may prevent this). All the while, the paper companies have smashed the unions, logging remains one of the most dangerous businesses imaginable, small commercial fisherman are a dying breed, and Maine's youth have little or no job prospects.
To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, "Maine is a Garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do-ray-mi."
Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe recently got a lot of good press because they were the only Republicans to support Obama's stimulus package. But I can't help pointing out that the price they extracted from Obama for their support was slashing tens of billions in desperately needed help for public schools, like Gray-New Gloucester High School where I graduated from.
Jamilla's article showed that, while Collins and Snowe have been able to ride their wealth to power, there's another side to Maine. Where working people are facing the same problems everyone else is facing around the country...and they've had about enough of it.
The corporations and the rich have long thought of Maine as their playground (the Bush clan maintains an obscene "compound" in Kennebunkport--"Walkers Point," it's called) and the people who live and work there as quaint relics of the past. With any luck, the victory over Nestlé will be the first of many more to come, giving real meaning to Maine's state motto, "Dirigo." Translated from the Latin, "I lead."
Todd Chretien, Oakland, Calif,
