Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [82]
The whole thing costs two million dollars a year to run. Is it really necessary? The source of the E. coli was never found, the department’s superintendent tells me, and he heard of no one who’d gotten sick. In Breck Speed’s world, people who live in towns where water treatment costs “too much” would revert to bottled water. His brand is cheap, he says, only $6.75 for five gallons. I do the math: to supply drinking (not cooking) water to a family of four would run upward of $200 a month. (That’s the price today. As demand rises, clean water becomes scarce, and delivering it gets more expensive; Speed will probably raise his rates.)
Ditching tap water for bottled, the NRDC’s Eric Goldstein says, “would be enormously expensive for society as a whole. It would leave vast quantities of Americans with the Hobson’s choice of paying more for drinking water or relying on a public supply that could become increasingly inferior if it were abandoned by the elected officers and government decision makers.”
It is tempting to think that the rise of bottled water reflects a simple shift from status consciousness to a concern with health and convenience. But to the pressure groups bent on running Nestlé out of small towns, and Coke off the face of the planet, drinking bottled water is a far more political act: it’s an affirmation that water is a commodity, and that it’s okay for corporations to control it.
The United Nations deems water a basic human right. But what does this mean? Sure, we all need water to live, but protecting and delivering it isn’t free. Even in ancient Rome, where water came free to spigots built with public scudi, individuals paid extra to have water piped into their homes. Treating water as a commodity as well as a right is hardly a new idea. In fact, paying more for water in this country is probably the only way we’re going to protect and improve it.
But who should do the protecting? Not private corporations, say Maude Barlow, of the Blue Planet Run Foundation, and Sara Ehrhardt, national water campaigner of the Council of Canadians. “The water we drink is simply too precious to trust to corporate hands, and too essential to rely on market forces alone to ensure equitable access and distribution,” they write in Grist magazine. “The solution lies in declaring water as a human right and a public trust to be guarded by all levels of government; in sharing information and best practices on our public water systems; and in overseeing and protecting our public drinking water for future generations.”
For antiprivatization groups, drinking bottled water when you’ve got safe tap water is traitorous. Gigi Kellett, associate campaigns director of Corporate Accountability International, links our obsession with Volvic and Voss to the looming privatization of public supplies, whether bottled or delivered through pipes, here or in the developing world. “We want to connect people here to the water crisis there, connect them to water protection in this country, and help them understand corporate control of water,” she says. “To whom are we turning to provide water? Is it Coke, Nestlé, and Pepsi, or are we looking to locally controlled democratic cities and towns?”
I review my recent water-drinking history, struggling to make the argument concrete. Visiting a Midwestern college, I’m shocked to learn there’s no drinking-water fountain in the gym. I row across New York Harbor with a group of college students, and while I sip from the public fountain near the shore, they hike ten minutes