E-Mail This Article to a Friend The coming water wars (continued)
	Related links Massachusetts Global Action A grassroots organization that grew out of three separate groups: the Massachusetts Anti-Corporate Clearinghouse, the Campaign on Contingent Work, and the Boston Social Forum. They’re leading the battle against privatization here in Massachusetts, and creating legislation that would protect cities and towns from corporate water control. Charles River Watershed Association Learn more about efforts to protect and restore local rivers. Take a look at the Rainwater Recovery Systems, created by the CRWA to capture rooftop runoff during rainstorms — they’re a creative way to redistribute water that would otherwise be wasted. The Polaris Institute This Canadian institute provides tools, research, and support to social-movement activists; visit the site to learn more about water rights, bottled water, and globalization. Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection The DEP can supply information about your local drinking-water source and supply. Water Allies Network News and resources for people interested in everything water. US Environmental Protection Agency The Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey offers a glimpse at just how much improvement is necessary.

Blue gold

Corporations aren’t stopping with your tap water and your toilet. The four biggest water bottlers — Coca-Cola (Dasani), Pepsi (Aquafina), Nestlé (Poland Spring), and Danone (Evian) — are putting down roots in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, California, and Florida. Some draw directly from natural springs; others (like Coke and Pepsi) simply take municipal tap water, add some minerals, and package it. Either way, bottled-water plants are inserting straws into US water sources and sucking hard.

In 2003, bottled-water sales reached $35 billion worldwide — up from just $300 million 30 years ago, and $22 billion five years ago. Sales of bottled water surpass those of beer, coffee, and milk, and are second only to soda. That, combined with the growing private water-management industry, is why Ruth Caplan (who is based in Washington, DC, and also serves as chair of the Sierra Club’s Water Privatization Task Force) often calls water "blue gold," or "the next oil."

"Corporations want to treat water like they would any other resource," Caplan says. "They want to prospect for it, they want to mine it, and they want to sell it to the highest bidder.

"When we begin to sell water in bottles," she continues, "it begins to make people think of water as just another product, as opposed to something that is being held in the public trust."

Perhaps realizing that philosophical arguments won’t make much difference to gym-going, convenience-seeking, health-conscious bottled-water drinkers, the Polaris Institute of Canada, an activist resource center, recently released Inside the Bottle: An Exposé of the Bottled Water Industry. In the report, the institute presents evidence of both the environmental and the health-related risks posed by bottled water, calling into question whether it’s really the better alternative to simple tap water.

Inside the Bottle claims that in the United States, where tap water faces strict EPA regulations, bottled water faces less-stringent, and less-frequent, Food and Drug Administration monitoring. (Both the International and the Canadian Bottled Water Associations have responded to the report, insisting that their product is strictly monitored, which has prompted a fevered debate on Polaris’s Web site at www.polarisinstitute.org.)

The report also shows that by drinking water out of a plastic bottle (the manufacturing and disposal of which can add to air and water pollution), "you’re holding part of the smoking gun that’s led you to the bottled water" in the first place, says Karl Flecker, education coordinator for Polaris.

Then there’s the matter of personal economy: consumers pay between 240 and 10,000 times more for bottled water than they would by taking a glass from the faucet.

Even the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) feels the need to compete with bottled-water mania. "Bottled water may taste better than the water that comes out of your tap," the agency’s Web site reads, "but it’s a lot more expensive and isn’t necessarily ‘healthier.’"

Trickling down?

Chugging bottled water may seem particularly unnecessary here in Boston, where no one denies that the drinking water is generally clean, safe, and tasty. But local environmental watchdogs say contamination and conservation are areas that remain relevant, and that more funds are needed to manage both effectively. Without such efforts, we’re likely to see a decline in both water quality and water levels.

"There’s not nearly enough money going out on the federal level," says Mike Davis of Clean Water Action. "There are definitely some really good people over at [the state DEP] that care about our water, but unfortunately, they don’t have enough resources to go out and work with people in these local cities and towns throughout Massachusetts, to protect their drinking water." In fact, DEP’s drinking-water budget has been cut 25 percent since 2001.

With more money, the state and its cities and towns could start taking proactive steps toward renovating pipes and storage tanks, and could more effectively test local water supplies for thousands of contaminants. (Right now, federal law regulates about 100 contaminants — a mere drop in the bucket compared with the approximately 75,000 industrial chemicals that could make their way into the water supply but aren’t subject to drinking-water tests.)

"Obviously, you can’t go out and test for thousands of chemicals because it costs too much money — testing is expensive," Davis explains. "But what you can do is ... you can do an inventory of chemicals that are actually used in your water supply, and you can narrow them down and say, ‘Okay, what do we really need to work on?’"

According to an EPA report titled The Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Study, as of six years ago, the state’s drinking-water system needed a whopping $5.8 billion over the next 20 years — $4 billion to replace aging water mains, $1.3 billion for treatment plants, $460 million for water-storage facilities, and $170 million to develop new water sources — just to maintain then-current standards. At that point, Congress had allocated only $3.6 billion for such efforts nationally between 1997 and 1999 — and that was before Republicans controlled all three branches of government.

We could also use more-creative water-usage plans, to preserve current water levels, says Bob Zimmerman, who serves as executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association. "De-watering" is the term he uses to describe what’s happening to much of Eastern Massachusetts. Zimmerman has spent 14 years struggling to protect and restore the once-foully polluted Charles River. Now, he’s worried that the water he’s fought to keep clean is in danger of disappearing.

In a perfect world, planners would have engineered a water system that allows the natural water cycle to work the way it’s supposed to, Zimmerman says. Instead, with the MWRA, we have a system that takes water from one place (primarily the Quabbin Reservoir) and shuttles it through pipes and storage tanks until it comes through our faucets. Then, it’s treated as sewage at Deer Island and diffused out the end of a nine-and-a-half-mile-long pipe into Massachusetts Bay.

Meanwhile, towns like Dedham, Wilmington, and Reading are clamoring to join the MWRA system (which already covers 21 "core communities" — including Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville — that use both water and sewer services, and 40 more that tap into one or the other). On the upside, Convery reports that water use has come down significantly since the 1980s (from 340 to 230 million gallons per day). But the systemic problems remain, regardless of whether usage is up or down, Zimmerman contends. "We throw water away," he says. "That doesn’t work. It’s not the way the environment works. It’s incumbent on us to keep water where it belongs — when it falls out of the sky, to keep it where it falls, when we take it out of the ground, to return it to the ground. There’s no reason for us to run out of water.

"Unless we change our ways, the demand in the megalopolitan area will be such that the MWRA won’t be able to meet the demand."

Take it from Paul Robillard, director of the Cambridge-based World Water Watch — we don’t want to get to that point. Like many of the activists involved in water struggles, Robillard has traveled to regions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa where water shortages are more than just an inconvenience — they’re a security and health disaster.

Beyond its importance as a material and biological necessity, "water has a sort of spiritual value," says Tufts’s Kirshen. "Everybody wants to be near water. People always try to site restaurants near water, they always walk by the water, water is a large part of religious ceremony — water is life, that’s what people say."

Deirdre Fulton can be reached at dfulton[a]phx.com