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Review: Bottlemania by Elizabeth Royte
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826592.100&print=true
8.6.4
Chris Mooney

ALLOW me to grovel, confess, repent: I drink a lot of bottled water.
At a time when anti-corporate activists and environmentalists are
targeting the booming bottled water industry on sustainability
grounds, and even comparing people like myself to Hummer drivers,
that has me more than a little concerned for my eco-cred.

So I expected Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania to put me in my place.
After all, it opens by declaring bottled water "either the biggest
scam in marketing history or a harbinger of far worse things to
come". By the end, though, Royte's reportorial honesty gets the
better of her apparent politics, and she shows us that the issue of
what to drink, when drink we must, is as murky as the Mississippi.

Bottled and tap water both have serious issues: for bottled water,
concerns about the ecological footprint of production and corporate
exploitation of water supplies; for tap, lingering worries about
harmful contaminants. Royte explains these in painstaking detail,
and admits that given the basic distastefulness of tap - sure, in
the US it's generally safe, but hardly fail-safe, and who knows
about the quality of those pipes - she understands why so many
people can be found clutching their stylishly bottled Vosses and
Fijis.

At the centre of Royte's tale is Fryeburg, a small town in western
Maine where the townspeople have rebelled against corporate behemoth
Nestlé over the channelling of their community's water into armadas
of tanker trucks and, ultimately, countless Poland Spring bottles.
Here again, things are murky. In her account, the leading activist
in Fryeburg comes across curmudgeonly, even crankish, while some
nearby towns have welcomed Nestlé for bringing in new jobs.

For Royte, the Fryeburg situation is a glimpse of what the water
wars of the future will look like: communities riven, big
corporations cleverly lobbying and buying up land, and everyone
hiring personal hydrologists (or, as Royte puts it,
"hydrostitutes").

Without dismissing bottled water outright, Royte argues that at a
time of climate change and increasing risks to global water
supplies, we must change the way we think about this crucial
resource and begin treating it as a public good to be preserved,
rather than the equivalent of an oil deposit or timber forest, ripe
for corporate exploitation.

If there's a flaw to the book, it's Royte's persistent
back-and-forthism. Sometimes she portrays Nestlé as the devil
incarnate; other times she can see the appeal of bottled water and
seems sceptical of the anti-corporate activists. Meanwhile, as Royte
runs through Brita filters, Nalgene bottles and testing labs in an
attempt to figure out how to keep her own family's tap water safe, I
can't help thinking that the average person, sans book deal, will
never have the time or resources to become so meticulously informed.

In the end, it's simple. Until we, as societies, invest a great deal
more in cleaning up and protecting our public water supplies, the
beautiful bottle - and the corporations behind it - will continue to
triumph.

Related Articles

Is this the beginning of water wars?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13655
11 April 2008
Review: Shopping our Way to Safety by Andrew Szasz
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626330.800
08 December 2007
Review: The Hot Topic by Gabrielle Walker and David King
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726422.400
09 February 2008

Weblinks

Elizabeth Royte's website
http://www.bottlemania.net/author.html
Bottled water is set to be the latest battleground in the ecowar, in, 
London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/10/water.foodanddrink?gusrc=rss&feed=environment
Bottled water is 'immoral' in, London
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/17/eawater117.xml
Chris Mooney's blog
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/