Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [89]
I come away from my investigations with at least one certainty: not all tap water is perfect. But it is the devil we know, the devil we have standing to negotiate with and to improve. Bottled-water companies don’t answer to the public, they answer to shareholders. As Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman write in Thirst, “If citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?”
Bottled water does have its place—it’s useful in emergencies and essential for people whose health can’t tolerate even filtered water. But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.
Certainly, nearly everything humans do has an environmental impact—biking to work, recycling newspapers, and drinking tap water included. But understanding that impact is the first step toward reducing it. It’s true that the impact of bottled water looks minuscule next to other water uses—growing beef, say, or manufacturing cars. But try telling that to someone who lives on a springwater truck route or who drinks from a well that shares an aquifer with a commercial pump. As Lucy sings out when I try to tell her that some problem of hers is trivial in the larger scheme of things, “Not for me-eeee.”
If someday I find myself wanting to buy bottled water, I will do it as an informed consumer, someone who knows that the images on the label may not reflect an ecological reality, that part of its sticker price may be landing in the pockets of lawyers and PR flacks, that profits probably aren’t benefiting those who live near the source, and that the bottle and its transportation have a significant carbon footprint. And then I will try to drink with the fullest pleasure; pleasure that, to quote Wendell Berry on the pleasure of eating, “does not depend on ignorance.”
I started my water investigations in Fryeburg, Maine, where Howard Dearborn insists Poland Spring is ruining his pond. Is it? Possibly, because pumping leaves less water to dilute phosphorus, which seems to be spurring excessive plant growth. Does the pumping affect other ecosystems? Unclear—but the argument that there’s no such thing as “excess” water is compelling: all that Poland Spring water—180 million gallons a year—used to reach downstream ecosystems before it was diverted to tanker trucks. Are the trucks annoying, and potentially dangerous? Yes. Does the town get any benefit from the operation? It did, a bit, when income from Pure Mountain Springs kept rates down. But after the buyout, who knows what will happen? If Poland Spring builds a bottling plant, some will get jobs, but the town, as a whole, may suffer.
And then there’s an even more important question: is it right—forget about legal, for a moment—for an outside corporation to contradict the wishes of the community? Increasingly, citizens are thinking not. In tiny towns across the nation, grassroots groups, connected by the Internet and cheered on by antiglobalization activists, are fighting such intrusions—from confined-animal-feeding operations in Iowa, to landfills in rural Pennsylvania, to Wal-Marts in suburbs everywhere.