Groundwater and corporate funding of science: The need for historical context

Here in Ontario, groundwater has often been very political.  15 years ago controversy about suburban development around Toronto centered on whether paving the Oak Ridges Moraine would damage its function as a storage device for groundwater.  Activists described it as the region's endangered "rain barrel".  These concerns encouraged fairly effective restrictions on development, including the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan of 2001.

And now, there's debate about another potential risk for the region's groundwater: Nestl� Waters is pumping and bottling water.  Some have philosophical concerns about this � asking whether it's appropriate to take a public resource and package it for sale at many times the price of tap water.  Instead, water (as Maude Barlow and others have long argued) should be considered a human right, not a commodity.  Others are concerned about direct impacts on the resource itself, with some presenting evidence of declining water levels.

The issue has also raised questions about corporate funding of research, as Beth Parker, a scientist at the University of Guelph, has accepted funding from Nestl� for her studies of groundwater.  In response, Parker has noted that while Nestl� will comment on her research, it has no control over it � that this funding is only seed money, and her study will be subject to peer review, not corporate oversight.

But this aspect of the issue deserves closer attention.  There's an ample history of corporate funding shaping our understanding of the environment, and therefore how we choose to use it.  While it's not reasonable to condemn a particular scientist's decision to accept industry funding, particularly in the context of research structures in Canada that now strongly encourage scientists to pursue this funding, we need to study more carefully just how these arrangements influence what we know about the resources we choose to exploit.

Such a study should be guided by a few basic ideas about corporate science.

First, that it's not a static phenomenon, but one that is evolving, complex, and heterogeneous, that resists simple definitions, and carries diverse meanings.  In these respects, corporate science reflects the complexities of corporations themselves.

Second, that contemporary corporate science is a highly networked and structurally diverse phenomenon, encouraged by evolving government policies, corporate restructuring, and economic contexts.  As such, it represents a novel chapter in the history of science and society.  Its analysis requires consideration of multiple institutions, and of the ties between them: corporations, other economic actors, government agencies, and universities.

And third, that corporate science in a variety of fields, including health, the environment, natural resources and agriculture, often favors narrowly-defined economic objectives over the public good.  In natural resources management, for example, science commonly emphasizes improving efficiency of extraction over long-term stewardship of resources and landscapes.  Similarly, corporate support for agricultural science emphasizes the most commercially promising areas, such as biotechnology, with less attention to the broader impacts of this technology, or to alternative approaches such as organic farming.