Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [7]
Sure, the fuss in Fryeburg seems to be of far less import than battles over access to Assyrian irrigation canals or the damming of the Tigris River for military purposes. But it isn’t. Today’s struggle may lack spears and guns (so far), but in fifty years we may look back at the campaign to control Maine’s groundwater as a defining moment in history. This is what modern water conflict looks like: neighbors fighting with neighbors, little towns fending off major corporations, life savings handed over to attorneys, interminable public meetings, property values gone to hell, dried-up or contaminated wells, and too many plants on the bottom of your pond. Every time I see a Poland Spring bottle—or a bottle of Evian, Fiji, or Voss—on my street in New York, I am reminded that real people live near its source, its tanker station, bottling plants, and the roads that lead to the highways that bring the water to me. Quite a lot of them aren’t happy to have lost their say, to an outside corporation, over a resource so essential to their lives.
How did bottled water become so popular in the first place? And is it popular for good reasons or bad? What does it mean that we are abandoning municipal supplies? Twenty years ago, bottled water was a niche market, and the United States had no large-scale water-bottling industry. Today, of course, those bottles fill not only the shelves of gourmet stores (at Whole Foods, bottled water is the number-one item, by units sold) but also those of the A&P. They are ubiquitous in vending machines, at newsstands, and in gas stations. Our cars, StairMasters, and movie-theater seats have been redesigned to accommodate them. Altogether, more than seven hundred domestic and seventy-five imported brands are sold in the United States. The water comes from wells, springs, glaciers, icebergs, and rain, and from under the seafloor. Does this make it a preferable alternative to tap? Is bottling water sustainable? How does it help or hurt our world?
Even at the very start of my water investigations, I can see that I’ll be dealing with two sets of questions. One has concrete answers: what are the physical differences between tap water and bottled, and what is water bottling actually doing to the environment and to local communities? The other questions are more abstract: Even if bottled water makes sense, for health or other reasons, even if it is harmless, is it ethical to profit from its sale? If we believe water is a basic human right—such as freedom from persecution or equality before the law—then why would we let anyone slap a bar code on it?
Chapter 2
ALL YOU CAN DRINK
I MAKE A COLD call and invite Michael Mascha to lunch in New York City. Mascha is a bottled-water expert, a bottled-water snob, in fact. Forced by his doctor to give up drinking alcohol roughly ten years earlier, Mascha ran hard in the other direction, embracing fancy water and starting a Web site for “bottled water connoisseurs.” He’d recently written a book called Fine Waters: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Most Distinctive Bottled Waters, which I carry with me as I shop for something to pour him.
Since the weather is cloudless and warm, I decide we should eat and drink alfresco, in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, on Forty-second Street. Mascha doesn’t know it (he’s Austrian and lives in Texas), but the park holds an important place in New York City’s water history. More than 160 years ago, the city dammed the Croton River, in Westchester County, and sent its sweet waters forty-one miles through an aqueduct and pipes to a receiving reservoir in what is now Central Park. From there, the Croton flowed into an enormous distributing reservoir that stood right here, on Forty-second Street—at the time a pastoral hinterland. Decorated with Egyptian motifs, the reservoir covered four acres, with walls fifty feet high and twenty-five feet thick. To the west of the reservoir was Reservoir Square, which had been converted to a park from a potter’s field. In 1884, this patch