What makes someone greedy is their inability to know when they have more than enough. It’s not simply being wealthy and having power, it’s a pursuit of owning and having ALL the wealth and power. It led Republicans like Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, last month, to announce that the six-year plastic bottle reduction plan in our National Parks would be abruptly ending. At the time, this announcement was unbelievable—considering that the only people missing the bottled water were the bottle-water makers themselves. Yes, I know. That’s the point. The decision to end the plastic bottle ban is—like everything in this administration—even more egregious than you can imagine. A FOIA document of a NPS report on the program, requested and released this past Friday says the agency knew full well that the plastic bottle initiative was working exactly as hoped. Mother Jones explains:
In 2011, the NPS started allowing parks to voluntarily phase out the sale of disposable plastic water bottles and install water fountains instead. As of this year, 23 out of 417 parks were in the program—including Mount Rushmore, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Grand Canyon. In a report completed in May, the NPS found that the ban had prevented the use of between 1.3 and 2 million bottles—or between 73,000 and 112,000 pounds of plastic—per year in the participating parks. That’s as if up to 12,000 Americans stopped using disposable plastic water bottles for a year. [...]
In a press release on its termination of the bottle ban program, the NPS asserted that “the ban removed the healthiest beverage choice at a variety of parks while still allowing sales of bottled sweetened drinks,” an argument repeatedly raised by the International Bottled Water Association, a lobbying group. (The IBWA spent nearly five times more on lobbying last year than it did before the ban program was enacted). That assertion by the NPS contradicts its earlier report, which said that parks that wanted to participate in the program had to complete an analysis to ensure that park employees and visitors would have adequate alternative safe drinking water sources, and install “conveniently located” water fountains.
The Republican-led administration has all kinds of great ways to cut up our shared lands and hand them over to their big corporate overlords, including privatizing under corporate sponsorship programs that would allow us to call the Grand Canyon something more catchy like “ExxonMobil presents the grand oilless hole!”