Water, Water Everywhere

It must be in the air -- water, I mean. For some reason, I've been hearing a lot about it, which is not necessarily a good thing for someone with a bladder as small as mine.

First, my friend Josh wrote a kick-ass opinion piece for the Seattle Times that made me start to think two, three and four times before I buy a bottle of water. Now, I carry a big plastic cup around in my purse. If I want a drink, I find a faucet rather than buy a plastic bottle that requires more water to manufacture than the water it contains. AND...if I DO need to buy a bottle, I make sure the empty go into a recycling bin. Josh says only 20% of all plastic water bottles are recycled! SHEESH!

The other night, my friend John barked at me for drinking Perrier because of his his obsession with Aquafina's Sparkling Berry flavored water. He's buying and drinking it by the case! I really hope he's recycling those bottles.

Then, my friend Sara and I recounted an episode of Showtime's "Penn & Teller's Bullshit" which exposed the ludicrous water snobbishness that Americans have developed. The show created a faux restaurant that specialized in "gourmet waters" from around the world (the real source: a rubber hose in the back alley). Customers gushed over the phony samples as the waiter described them with adjectives worthy of a wine steward. About purity: Josh warns us not to expect it in our bottled water, no matter what the label says. Tap water is just as good, if not better.

And today, the New York Times printed an editorial similar to Josh's, calling for the world's bottled water profits to go into creating healthy drinking water sources around the world so that we can ALL enjoy a safe water supply.

This all reminds me of a fantastic book entitled Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. The content sounds a bit dry, but it is a rollicking tale about the West's unquenchable thirst and inevitable dependence on the federal government to maintain its habitability. The chapter about a crazy plan to drain the Yosemite reservoir for the city of Los Angeles is worth the price of the book (it's the back story to "Chinatown" really), but there is much more to the story, like...did you know that the Colorado River is used so heavily, it no longer reaches all the way to its mouth?

Man, I gotta pee.