Country Corner
Steve Fairchild, editor

Back to the faucet; bottled water isn't sustainable

If you’ve sat down to this column with a plastic bottle of water, take your last guilt-free drink before you read any further. You’ve been told that drinking water is one pain-free step to better health. And that’s true so far as it goes. We’re 70 percent water, after all, and better to keep that balance than to desiccate toward a parched and early demise. But do yourself a favor, pack a Thermos (the old, long-lasting metal type) to the field. Those plastic bottles you buy by the case at the local grocery are increasing your carbon footprint and worse, your moral hazard.
Of all industrial products, plastic least needs a lobby. We’re hooked on the stuff. Plastic’s ubiquity comes from its utility. At this very moment, you can take a gander in a 10-foot radius and count a dozen items that, without plastic, would either cost a fortune or not exist. But now that petroleum, a major component of most plastic, is a bit more dear, and now that sustainability, food miles and carbon foot-prints are themes of the day, you are faced with a moral dilemma. Your plastic bottle is the cause of war and earthly pestilence—it’s not sustainable.
Of course, as a farmer, you are accustomed to the burrs of sustainability. You use commercial fertilizer. You grow corn for ethanol. You grow livestock in places other than some great expanse of fenceless pasture. Perhaps it’s refreshing to see someone else in the sights of the insatiable critics of modernity.
“Sipping bottled water is suddenly more unsavory than wearing a chinchilla coat to your kid’s class play. San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, the hippest mayor on the planet, banned city agencies from buying bottled water. Chichi restaurants around the country increasingly won’t serve it. The bottled-water industry is so alarmed, it apparently distributed talking points to the various water companies,” wrote Kevin Maney for the November issue of Portfolio, a new business magazine from Cond´e Nast.
As price takers in a thin-margin business like agriculture, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for companies that get away with charging better than a dollar for a pint of the world’s most common commodity. But it gets worse.
On the Web site of England’s version of a high-end lifestyle farming publication, Country Life, editor Carla Carlisle plods on for a few hundred strident words about how it’s bottled water that has gotten the western world into war in Iraq. We need petroleum, she reckons, to make the plastic bottles we so flippantly pack around without regard to the geopolitical ramifications they bring. You’ve heard of blood diamonds, but unless you’re recently betrothed, it’s blood bottles you’d ought to be worrying about.
Where does it end? With the lot of us huddled in a cave slurping from sustainable sheep skins is my guess.
I drink bottled water because the glass I fill from the tap keeps spilling when I put it in my backpack. I use plastic because it’s durable, useful and convenient.
The real trouble with environmentalism and the cult of sustainability is that there is a cascade of inappropriate practices du jour. Even when one practice is proven harmless, there is something new to protest. And if you look closely, you’ll often find there is an angle to profit financially or politically from it.
But all is not so grim. If the moral hazard you purchase by drinking from plastic bottles grows too heavy to bear, I hope you’ll take solace in the fact that researchers in Europe have recently discovered that, after exercise, beer is more efficient at rehydration than water. Now there is something to which we can raise an old-fashioned, breakable glass.

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