• Lee Mann Exhibition–Art opening, Thurs., March 1, 5 p.m, Skagit Valley College multipurpose room. Letters and photos of longtime Skagit Valley human rights advocate Lee Mann on display. His son, Bryce Mann, to make the presentation.
• Human Rights Display, Fri., March 2, 5-7 p.m., Lincoln Theatre Art Bar, downtown Mount Vernon. Skagit art pieces will relate to corporations, civil liberties, water and labor. Artists Richard Olmsted, Thais Armstrong, Sue Wren, Jessica Gigot and Kerry Scott.
• Corporations and the Rise of Occupy, Thur., March 8, 7 p.m., Phillip Tarro Theatre, Skagit Valley College. Movie showing of Inside Job about the U. S. financial crisis followed by a corporate personhood Q&A panel session. Panel members involved with the Northwest Occupy Movement.
• Civil Liberties and E-Verify, Thurs., March 15, 7 p.m., Phillip Tarro Theatre, Skagit Valley College. Lt. Col. Margaret Stock (ret.), political science instructor and award winning lawyer from Alaska, explains how the E-Verify national database will impact all of us–not only undocumented immigrants.
• Defending Water, Thurs., March 22, 7 p.m., Lincoln Theatre, downtown Mount Vernon. Sandra Spargo, Alliance for Democracy, will show the movie TAPPED about the bottled water industry and will discuss the Anacortes contract to build a bottled water/beverage & food manufacturing plant entitled to five million gallons of water per day.
• Labor, Thurs., March 29, 7 p.m., Lincoln Theatre, downtown Mount Vernon. Jeff Johnson, President of the Washington State Labor Council, and young labor activists will describe how unions champion the rights of all workers and will show two short movies: Eyes on the Fries and We Are the ILWU.

Skagit Human Rights Festival 2012

To download a full size copy of the poster, right click + “save as” HERE or on the image above!

Whitney Pipkin | Posted: Tuesday, December 6, 2011 3:28 pm

ANACORTES — A group opposing a proposed bottling plant in Anacortes. called Defending Water in the Skagit River Basin, has now launched a website. The site is linked to other Defending Water sites that have sprouted up in Oregon and Maine in opposition to similar projects.

The city of Anacortes signed a contract with Tethys Enterprises, Inc. in 2010 that gives the company rights to 5 million gallons of water per day for the bottling plant it would like to build.

Tethys CEO Steve Winter has presented the 1 million-square-foot plant at public meetings as a one-of-a-kind venture that, as proposed, would change the industry by aggregating in one place what had been done at multiple plants.

The Defending Water group formed soon after the City Council agreed to the contract with Tethys last year. At Tethys’ request, the council agreed in August to extend the deadline by which the company would need to find land for the project, which had been set for the end of this year, to the end of 2012.

Parks Chief Blocked Plan for Grand Canyon Bottle Ban

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation’s parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.

Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before its Jan. 1 start date that Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand and has donated more than $13 million to the parks, had registered its concerns about the bottle ban through the foundation, and that the project was being tabled. His account was confirmed by park, foundation and company officials.

A spokesman for the National Park Service, David Barna, said it was Jon Jarvis, the top federal parks official, who made the “decision to put it on hold until we can get more information.” He added that “reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan. This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it.”

Mr. Martin, a 35-year veteran of the park service who had risen to the No. 2 post in 2003, was disheartened by the outcome. “That was upsetting news because of what I felt were ethical issues surrounding the idea of being influenced unduly by business,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “It was even more of a concern because we had worked with all the people who would be truly affected in their sales and bottom line, and they accepted it.”

Neil J. Mulholland, president of the foundation, said that a representative of Coca-Cola had reached out to him late in the process to inquire about the reasons for the water bottle ban and how it would work.

“There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban,” Mr. Mulholland said, adding, “There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we’re losing their support.” The foundation president noted in the interview that Coca-Cola had recently donated $80,000 for a recycling program on the Mall in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Susan Stribling, said the company would rather help address the plastic litter problem by increasing the availability of recycling programs. “Banning anything is never the right answer,” she said. “If you do that, you don’t necessarily address the problem.” She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. “You’re not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume,” she said.

In seeking the ban, the Grand Canyon park, under Mr. Martin’s direction from 2006 until his retirement last December, was following the example of Zion National Park, in Utah, which had instituted a similar program to great acclaim in 2008. The park service gave it an environmental achievement award in 2009 for eliminating 60,000 plastic bottles from the park in its first year.

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the park’s total waste stream, according to the park service. Mr. Martin said the bottles are “the single biggest source of trash” found inside the canyon.

Mr. Martin said he got approval to proceed with implementing the ban after he briefed his superiors in both the Denver regional office and Washington headquarters in the spring of 2010. Research showed that the park sold about $400,000 worth of bottled water in a given year. The planned ban at the Grand Canyon would have covered only smaller bottles and would not have applied to other beverages such as soda or juices.

In preparation, the park and its contracted concessionaires installed more water “filling stations” for reusable bottles at a cost of about $300,000, according to information provided by the park service to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental group based in Washington that has worked to uncover the underlying reasons for the abrupt turn-around on the ban.

Senior park officials considered having Mr. Jarvis announce the ban to a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 2010. “From a media standpoint, we see this as good news, it fits perfectly into Jon’s sustainability goals,” Mr. Barna wrote in an internal park service e-mail. He concluded, “We are aware that others (Nestle, etc.) may not be thrilled at this decision but other than that, are there any downsides?”

In mid-December, Mr. Martin received a telephone call and an e-mail from his immediate boss, John Wessels, the Intermountain regional director for the park service, with news that the ban was being postponed indefinitely.

Mr. Jarvis said that he had not heard of the ban until Nov. 17, and felt that an action by Grand Canyon park would have more impact than Zion’s. He added: “My decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke, but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park.”

The decision was laid out in an e-mail by Jo A. Pendry, then chief of commercial services for the park service, who explained that during a Dec. 13 meeting, Mr. Jarvis “reiterated his decision to have the Grand Canyon hold off on implementation” until “we have hosted a meeting with the major producers of bottled water.”

She also wrote that Mr. Jarvis expected that Mr. Wessels would “touch base with the N.P.F./Coke, and he asked that I get in touch with you to see where you are with making that contact.”

The N.P.F. refers to the acronym for the nonprofit foundation, which was chartered by Congress to generate individual and corporate private donations to the national parks.

The e-mails were provided to The New York Times by a current park service employee concerned about the handling of the bottle ban. The employee declined to be identified because he does not have permission to speak publicly on the subject.

PEER, the public employees’ group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August seeking documents that could shed light on the decision, but only two documents — letters between Mr. Martin and representatives of the park concessionaire Xanterra — were released, said Jeff Ruch, the group’s president, who is weighing a lawsuit.

Asked why Mr. Mulholland, the president of the foundation, had been involved in the decision to table the ban, Mr. Barna, the park service spokesman, said, “He’s a partner, and he represents a lot of people who do good things in the parks. He’s a way for people to get introductions within the park service.”

Mr. Barna quickly added that he did not mean that donors could buy access.

For his part, Mr. Mulholland said he had no qualms about entertaining Coca-Cola’s questions and concerns. “I don’t feel conflicted, because the park service does a very good job of policing themselves and adhering to their standards,” he said.

• Executive Summary
• Basin Overview
• Climate Variability
• Climate Change Scenarios
• Glaciers
• Hydrology
• Geomorphology
• Ecosystems
• Human Systems
• Complete Report

 See http://www.skagitcounty.net/Common/asp/default.asp?d=EnvisionSkagit&c=General&P=reports.htm 

What Nestle would rather you did not know, is that byproducts styrene and benzene released into the air from producing their plastic water bottles may cause cancer.  In addition, Nestle admits to using BPA lined cans for their liquid baby formula, a plastic known to cause cancer.

for more info: http://www.allergystore.com/articles/water_3.htm and http://www.stainlesswaterbottles.org/2010/01/15/what-is-bpa-the-facts-and-details-of-bpa/

Here is the link to the article applauding Nestle for supporting Breast Cancer:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nestle-pure-life-purified-water-is-proud-to-partner-with-the-breast-cancer-research-foundation-to-support-breast-cancer-awareness-2011-09-28

It is a good pink-washing scheme, but we’re onto you Nestle!

Sept. 28, 2011 

Anacortes’ municipal water supply will be needed to address much of Skagit County’s predicted population growth of 100,000 by 2060. Tethys Enterprises’ consumption of five million gallons of water per day for a bottled water/beverage plant equals the same amount of water per day as 41,000 people at current rates of water consumption in our area.

Not only is the Skagit River our potable water source, it is a hydroelectric source for the City of Seattle. The Skagit River Hydroelectric Project, owned by Seattle City Light, provides about 25 percent of Seattle’s electrical power. In 2005, Seattle City Light studied the effects of climate change on the Skagit River. In short, “A warming climate could have significant effects on the hydrologic balance of watersheds on which hydropower depends. Model studies indicate that over the next 40 years, projected climate change could require the utility to reconsider its current operating procedures.”

The study indicates an increase in average monthly river flow during winter months and a decrease during spring months, resulting in a critical water management shift. The crux is that inflow during spring months is used to refill the Ross Reservoir for power generation during the following high-demand winter period when flood-control requirements limit useable storage of water. Under 2040 conditions, the study indicates current reservoir operation guidelines could not be modified to meet the current level of generation to serve load, in-stream flow requirements and flood control objectives, resulting in a projected loss to meet Seattle customer demand.

Water management is a climate change issue, as Anacortes City Council members learned during their study session of July 12, 2010. Guest Lara Whitely Binder of the Climate Impacts Group, U. of W., informed the Council of projected wetter winters and hotter, drier summers. She said, “Water supplies, water quality, in-stream flows, flood risk, hydroelectric supplies, public health, food production and the agricultural, forest and timber economies will be affected by climate change. Snow packs are declining and this trend is expected to continue.”

She warned that weather trends are not necessarily linear, and communities must be prepared to adapt and respond as climate conditions develop. In the face of our preparation to various climate change scenarios, no single water-entitlement community should build its kingdom at the expense of others—including a contract for more water-intensive industry that is entitled up to five million gallons of water per day to bottle our water and ship it, never again to return to our watershed. The right economic development is water sustainable. Why not a regional Skagit River Basin climate summit?

Sandra Spargo, Anacortes, Wash.

“Get hooked on something good,” they say.  We think all of these drug references are fascinating, considering how unnecessary and irresponsible it is to buy bottled water of any kind in the first place.  See the video to the right of this article, “The Story of Bottled Water” for a sobering summary of the impact of plastic bottles on our planet, and all those fuzzy animals that Nestle is ripping off.

Aside from the environmental impact of plastic bottles, Nestle’s tactics to acquire their “fix” has devastated multiple communities around the U.S.  We have a summary of articles underneath our “Nestle” tab for further information.

Animals do not want you to drink Nestle’s water, even if it has little bubbles in it.  Nestle does not protect the environment, they are not good stewards, they are simply a huge corporation looking to create the biggest quarterly statement for their shareholders…and right now, people are into “healthy” products.  Don’t let the glass food storage jars behind the squirrel fool you in the commericals.  Nestle would not make any money if you used your own tap water and squeezed some lime into it.  You can make healthy choices without supporting this company that has a long global history of being destructive to people and to the environment.

Links to press coverage:

http://www.bevnet.com/news/2011/nestle-brings-on-mother-nature

http://popsop.com/48343