Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [95]
Out of the Maine woods and inside the Beltway, there was water action on the legislative front. In the fall of 2008 Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) chaired a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the environmental impact of bottled water; then, with Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California), he introduced the Bottled Water Safety and Right to Know Act, which would ensure that companies give consumers information on their water’s origin and quality. (Coke, unlike Pepsi, still declines to reveal its public-water source.) The General Accounting Office began studying the environmental and health effects of bottled water. Before leaving office, President George W. Bush signed the Great Lakes compact, which provides sweeping environmental protection for the world’s largest freshwater system and forbids the bulk export of water out of the Great Lakes basin. But it leaves a significant loophole: Bottlers are still allowed to send water out of the basin if it’s packaged in containers smaller than 5.7 gallons, which means the shipping of single-use bottles and five-gallon jugs can continue apace, unless individual states decide to regulate its export.
The bottling of water—or beer or iced tea or soda—isn’t expected to drain the Great Lakes, of course. But the total amount of readily available fresh water on earth isn’t expected to increase; essentially, it has decreased as global warming has made some dry places drier, as the population ticks upward, as people in developing nations start eating like westerners (a meat-based diet requires far higher water inputs than does a plant-based diet), as corporations buy up water rights, and as human activity degrades what’s left to drink. In Quillagua, Chile, for example, the driest place on earth, mining companies have purchased and polluted so much of the Loa River, the region’s only waterway, that it’s essentially useless for much of the year. The town is on the verge of disappearing.
In the year since Bottlemania first appeared, the drought in Australia and in the American southwest has only deepened. And yet in many places, farmers, industry, and homeowners continue to pump groundwater faster than it’s replenished. After three years of light snowfall, California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in February 2009 declared a drought emergency: some farmers fallowed fields while others began switching to drought-tolerant crops. Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento are taking another look at recycling wastewater—from toilets, sinks, and showers—into drinking water. New Mexico is warily contemplating the extraction and treatment of its deep brackish groundwater; 14,000 desalinization plants are already pumping away in 125 countries. In Texas and Argentina, which is experiencing its most intense drought of the past fifty years, cattle are starving for lack of grass. In northern China, extreme drought threatens half the nation’s wheat. According to the March 2009 U.N. report “Water in a Changing World,” at least 60 percent of Chinese cities are now water stressed, and global food supplies could, by the year 2030, decrease by a third as water becomes scarce. Clearly, the value of fresh water is only going to rise, spectacularly.
James Bond ultimately vanquishes Dominic Greene, stranding him in a South American desert—a desert Greene created by damming a river—with only a can of motor oil to drink. But who will fight for the rest of us? In real life, Maude Barlow, now a senior advisor on water to the United Nations General Assembly, continues to oppose corporate control of water. At the Fifth World Water Forum, held in Istanbul in March 2009, she caucused with protesters who believe water is a basic human right. Inside the Forum, the giant water companies made their perennial argument that the only way to build infrastructure and deliver safe