Nestlé Waters’s recent purchase of a well and water-taking rights in the Township of Centre Wellington, Ontario, has garnered national and international attention, raising concerns about how groundwater resources should be managed. In this paper, we explore free market environmentalism as a way to resolve groundwater management and water-takings issues in Ontario. Controversy over groundwater resources and their use, as illustrated by the recent case in Ontario, has become more prevalent globally as concerns about groundwater quality and scarcity develop. Our results suggest that, in theory, the incorporation of private property rights and the common law principle of riparian rights into provincial groundwater allocation mechanisms has the potential to resolve the emerging conflicts in Ontario. However, our analysis reveals that the current level of politicization in Ontario’s water allocation and pricing systems, combined with the current lack of adequate monitoring and documentation of groundwater use, are significant barriers to implementing a resource allocation mechanism for groundwater based on the principles of private ownership and riparian rights. We address these limitations to gain a deeper understanding the implications of the current water-takings system in Ontario, and conclude that these limitations deserve greater social and political attention if these controversies are to be resolved. While free market environmentalism has solutions to offer to Ontario’s groundwater management issue, the current political and institutional approaches to groundwater allocation and pricing in Ontario do not allow for them to be fully applied.
Underground water sources and their movement in various rocks, including karsts, are of considerable interest for many reasons, among which human economic activity plays a significant role. Various compounds are used to trace underground waters – stable and radioactive isotopes, microorganisms and bacteriophages, solid particles as lycopodium spores, chlorides and bromides, other ions, as well as fluorescent dyes. Relatively recently, DNA molecules have been used for this purpose, which can be detected with high sensitivity using a polymerase chain reaction. The commonly used number of DNA tracers is 1015 - 1016 molecules, which, despite significant dilution by water flows, ensures their subsequent detection. In addition to the high sensitivity of such analyses, other advantages of DNA molecules for tracing watercourses are their harmlessness for ecology, relative cheapness. In view of the possible destruction of DNA molecules in an aqueous medium and their sorption on various rocks, it is proposed to use encapsulated molecules, the shells of which are polylactic acid, silica, alginate and other compounds. An experiment on tracing the watercourse of the Tyutyulena stream from the ponor at the Kosh cave to the Traval griffin is predicted, indicating that in this case, taking into account the water flow, only about 1012 DNA molecules will be enough.
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