Abstract
For twenty years, Mt. Shasta, California (pop. 3287) has resisted the commercial bottling of water sourced from its namesake volcano, a 14,179-foot Cascade peak that is a cosmic, sacred mountain to many metaphysical groups. Mountain-centered spirituality shapes the town’s water activism and inspires an activist alliance with the Winnemem Wintu tribe. Origin myths recount the tribe’s emergence from a sacred spring on this mountain. This town-tribe activist alliance delayed the 2015 planned opening of the Crystal Geyser plant, successfully petitioned for an Environmental Impact Report, lost two lawsuits, and awaits a pending state court appeal. Under pressure from economic stakeholders, activists support a business model of spiritual tourism to protect its sacred water from the extractive capitalism of Crystal Geyser.
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Notes
- 1.
Conventional usage is “Mt. Shasta” for the town; “Mount Shasta” for the mountain.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jude Baldwin, Faculty Librarian of The College of Siskiyous Library, and Dennis R. Freeman, Emeritus Librarian, for expert assistance and consistent access to the library’s Mount Shasta Collection; and to graduate assistant Lindsey Aldrich from Bowling Green State University for her help with organizing and cataloguing newspaper coverage of the controversy. Bowling Green State University’s Institutional Review Board HSRB #712534 approved the initial interview and survey data collection phase of this study.
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Duntley, M. (2021). Saving Mount Shasta’s Sacred Water: The Spiritual Campaign Against Crystal Geyser. In: Silvern, S.E., Davis, E.H. (eds) Religion, Sustainability, and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7646-1_6
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