This time the battle is over the bottling of Michigan groundwater by Nestle, the Swiss multinational food company. Nestle is seeking permission to extract more water from an existing well about 100 miles from Flint, for sale in the Midwest. As long as it passes review, the expansion would only incur a nominal permit fee, to the dismay of critics who argue that Michigan is handing over its natural resources to a corporation for a song. There is no direct link between Flint’s municipal water crisis and Nestle’s pumping permit. But the emotions stirred by the mismanagement in Flint, and concern over how regulators failed to stop it, have combined to make Nestle a lightning rod for environmentalists and a potential test case for how that most basic of natural resources – groundwater – should be managed. “Flint has changed the conversation,” says Liz Kirkwood, director of FLOW, an advocacy group in Traverse City, Mich., that has contested Nestle’s application. In fact, officials in Osceola Township near the Nestle plant voted in April to deny the company a zoning permit to build a booster station so that it could handle additional flow from its wells. Nestle, which hopes to nearly double its permitted flow to 400 gallons per minute from its White Pines well, is appealing that decision. Although bottlers like Nestle don’t use nearly as much water as farms or factories, the dispute is calling attention to how water is regulated in the US. State laws typically offer wide latitude for property owners to pump groundwater for personal or business use. Nestle has argued that its increase wouldn’t put the environment at risk. Still, the company seems to concur with critics on one point – that the Flint crisis has altered the zeitgeist here. “What happened in Flint is a tragedy … we feel frustration about this,” says Nelson Switzer, chief sustainability officer for Nestle Waters North America. He points out that Nestle and other companies have donated bottled water to the city, which he visited in February. “Water is a passionate issue,” he adds. “People make decisions based on their data and their knowledge, and they make decisions based on passion and their emotional responses.” Like many well-watered states,…