Drinking Water Read online

  Drinking water is infused with symbolism and myth around the globe. There’s a reason that New Age voyagers are willing to flock to McCloud, that the McCloud River is said to flow with sacred water. Early Christian missionaries were entranced, as well. Soon after arriving in a new territory, they would rename the local pagan well after a Christian saint, often inventing a vivid story of a miracle to persuade doubters. What is it that leads people from vastly different cultures to view drinking water as special, with strikingly similar tales of water providing eternal youth, passages to the afterlife, miraculous cures, and mystical wisdom?

  In all of these stories, the physical act of drinking these special waters creates a medium to the supernatural, a means of connecting the physical and the metaphysical. And the mythmaking continues today, implicit in the marketing campaigns of many large bottled water companies.

  Of course, part of the attraction of bottled water is its perceived purity. Aquafina is the leading brand in the country. This Pepsi product is essentially municipal tap water that has been highly filtered, which may lead one to wonder why its label prominently features mountain peaks. The product’s slogan, spelled out in big letters, suggests why—“Pure Water. Perfect Taste.” A big part of the bottled water boom is due to concerns over health and the safety of tap water. But is bottled water really healthier than tap water? For that matter, how do we know that water, bottled or tap, is safe to drink in the first place?

  This proves to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Part of ensuring safety lies in engineering—from the protection of source waters through to final consumption. Our technical fixes range from Roman aqueducts and the unlikely market success of Dixie Cups a century ago to fluoridation battles in the 1950s and efforts since the attacks of 9/11 to protect our water supplies from terrorists. The more difficult part of ensuring safety lies, ironically, in simply deciding what it means to be safe. There is no life without water. Indeed, we use its presence as an indicator for the possibility of life beyond the earth. But drinking water can kill, and always has.

  The basic problem is that, apart from distilled water, no water source can ever be completely risk-free, whether from the tap or bottle. The water we drink contains a lot more than just two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Microbes and minerals have always been in our water and always will be. So how do we decide what is “safe enough”? The answer is as much cultural as scientific, depending on whether the drinker is in America or Bangladesh, and raises some thorny ethical issues in the process.

  In the world of 2030, the UN estimates that more than half the world’s population will live in water-scarce areas. This number could be even higher, depending on how climate change worsens droughts, reducing already scarce freshwater supplies. Today, where communal or free water sources are too far away or contaminated, the poor purchase their water from private providers—street vendors or tanker trucks. These prices are always higher than the price of water from municipal supply systems, often twelve times as much, with the tragic irony of the poorest in society paying the most for their water. Where safe water cannot be had at any price, it can kill. Unsafe drinking water is the single leading source of mortality in the developing world, exacting its greatest toll on children.

  The scarcity of safe drinking water has subtler consequences, though equally dire. In many developing countries, women and girls spend a large part of their day collecting domestic water. This squeezes out their opportunities for employment or education, perpetuating gender inequality and poverty. It is no exaggeration to say that providing drinking water to poor communities can transform lives, with social benefits equal to or greater than the health benefits. But in these communities, as McCloud witnessed, the search for private capital to provide local water has unleashed furious globalization battles, where proponents of privatization clash against claims for a human right to water.

  At a basic level, these debates concern the nature of drinking water, whether it should be managed as a commodity for sale or a public good. In 1776, the same year that the American colonies declared independence from Britain, Adam Smith, the father of economics sought to explain a paradox: Why are diamonds more valuable than water? Water is essential for life while diamonds are a fashion bauble, yet diamonds demand a much higher market price. Shouldn’t the opposite be true?

  In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained that the answer lay in supply and demand. Both diamonds and water are desired, but diamonds are scarce while drinking water is plentiful. Hence one commands high prices and the other is almost free for the taking. We have taken drinking water for granted. What held true in 1776, however, is no longer true in many parts of the world, and will certainly be wrong in the future. We have reached the tipping point where abundant, safe drinking water cannot be assumed. As a result, while some argue that there is a human right to water, many others contend that, if anything, water is far too cheap and should be even more of a market commodity. Whether we admit it or not, drinking water has become too valuable to take for granted.

  There is serious money at stake. No surprise, then, that venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have already decided that “blue is the new green.” The Earth Liberation Front sees the matter far differently, and while its violent method is widely condemned, its opposition to bottled water companies is shared by many. Criticism of corporate ownership of water has become a mainstay of the antiglobalization movement. The popular mantra is that drinking water is a public good, not a bar-coded product. Human need should take precedence over corporate greed. Water is for life, not profit.

  These make for great protest signs, but once one moves beyond facile slogans the issues become a good deal trickier. The real question is how society should best manage a scarce resource among conflicting demands. McCloud’s prior lifeblood, trees and timber, relied on the market. Wood is sold as a commodity, even when logged from national forests that belong to the public, and we seem to like it that way. Water is different, one might say, because it is necessary for survival. But it’s not so simple. People also need food to survive, but no one complains about farmers and companies charging for corn or beans. So what’s wrong with doing the same for water, even with a bar code?

  Who really owns the water, anyway? Should McCloud’s district board be able to sell the glacial melt filtered under Mount Shasta? Should Nestlé be able to buy it? These conflicts pit conservation and the duty not to harm your neighbor against the strong tradition of private property rights and the freedom to use the resources on and under your land as you see fit. The ethos of “Don’t Tread on Me!” and the allure of local jobs are on a collision course with concerns over depleting local groundwater and harming the fish and plants that depend on those waters.

  The ultimate privatization of water, of course, comes in the sale of disposable, personal containers of water. While we think of bottled water as a recent development, its sources run deep. The medieval market for holy waters provided the original template for the commercial branding of waters, satisfying the demands of the pilgrimage trade. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this developed into the practice of “taking the waters” at upscale spas such as Vichy in France, Baden-Baden in Germany, Bath in England, and Montecatini in Italy—towns that owed their economic existence to their spring waters. Thanks to developments in bottling technology in the late 1800s, people were able to take the waters from the spa, and the bottled water market took off.

  The introduction of chlorination in municipal water in the early 1900s led to the near collapse of the bottled water industry in America. The nationwide bottled water market did not exist four decades ago. In the 1960s, the idea of selling bottled water in a convenience store would have sounded as ludicrous as the suggestion that we sell bottled air. Now, though, the assumption has reversed, with the expectation that you shouldn’t get water for free. When was the last time you saw a public water fountain? Cafeterias and stadiums without free water are increasingly common. One gets the sense t
hat drinking fountains are following the path of public phones, more a historic curiosity than a given.

  Water is now widely viewed as much as a commodity as a public good. The highest-margin product in restaurants and convenience stores, twenty ounces of bottled water sells, at more that $8 per gallon, for far more than gasoline, yet it costs a fraction to produce.

  No wonder Nestlé is so interested in McCloud. But how to explain the paradox that in the United States today, at a time when we are delivering more clean tap water to more people than ever before, sales of bottled water are gushing through the roof? In the face of this growth, environmentalists, church groups, and local governments have turned their sights on bottled water, denouncing the packaging waste and transport impacts.

  THE LARGER THEMES OF MCCLOUD, THEN, SUGGEST MUCH BUT LEAVE even more unanswered. Where did bottled water come from and why has it become so popular? Why is the opposition so intense? Have natural waters always held such a powerful allure? Is our water safe to drink? What can be done for the billions of people who do not have access to safe drinking water? Will the combined threats of climate change and pollution soon make safe drinking water a scarce resource in America? And, as safe drinking water becomes increasingly scarce, who should own it? In answering these questions, the stories recounted in this book will feature different actors, different regions, and different eras, but all will be concerned with fundamentally the same issue: our relationship with drinking water.

  “Relationship” may seem a strange word to use for a glass of water, but it is apt. This book argues that how we conceive of drinking water has always been fundamental to our relationship with the liquid. And the relationship is ever evolving. Drinking water has long been the source of both conflict and veneration, of healing and sickness, and it has always been central to our sense of well-being.

  From ancient societies to the present, our conceptions of how this resource should be understood and managed—as sacred or market commodity, safe or unhealthy—have changed dramatically. In the chapters that follow, we will chart the course of that evolution.

  1

  The Fountain of Youth

  IN THE WINTER OF 1512, JUAN PONCE DE LEÓN HAD IT ALL. Two decades earlier, he had set off for the New World as a raw seventeen-year old deckhand on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage. When Columbus returned home, Ponce de León chose to stay on and seek his fortune. As his biographer later described, Ponce de León was a fierce fighter, hard and ambitious: “a man spirited, sagacious and diligent in all warlike matters.” These were valuable qualities in Spain’s emerging empire, where fabulous wealth was waiting to be taken, and they assured his rapid advance. He led the conquest of Puerto Rico, claiming the island for Spain, and was appointed governor in 1509. With lands and wealth to his name, he had officially arrived.

  Life at the top, though, was unsatisfying. Official duties and managing territories for the Crown were not the life for a conquistador. He wanted more. Seeking new adventures, he set out again, but this time in search of far more than the riches of land and gold. He had heard stories from local Indians of a truly remarkable place. As Washington Irving, the famed short story writer, later described:

  [This place] promised, not merely to satisfy the cravings of his ambition, but to realize the fondest dreams of the poets. They assured him that, far to the north, there existed a land abounding in gold and in all manner of delights; but, above all, possessing a river of such wonderful virtue, that whoever bathed in it would be restored to youth!

  Here was the dream of the alchemist realized! One had but to find this gifted land, and revel in the enjoyment of boundless riches and perennial youth! Nay, some of the ancient Indians declared that it was not necessary to go so far in quest of these rejuvenating waters, for that, in a certain island of the Bahama group, called Bimini, which lay far out in the ocean, there was a fountain possessing the same marvelous and inestimable qualities.

  Juan Ponce de León listened to these tales with fond credulity. He was advancing in life, and the ordinary term of existence seemed insufficient for his mighty plans. Could he but plunge into this marvelous fountain or gifted river, and come out with his battered war-worn body restored to the strength and freshness and suppleness of youth, and his head still retaining the wisdom and knowledge of age, what enterprises might he not accomplish in the additional course of vigorous years insured to him!

  Entranced, Ponce de León sought a charter from Spain’s King Ferdinand II for profits from any lands he might discover. The king granted his wish, and in March 1513, Ponce de León set out with three ships and sixty-five men. His pursuit of these magical waters took him throughout the Caribbean. He discovered the Gulf Stream, so critical to later navigators, and came upon a new land on Easter Sunday that he called Pascua de Florida—“flowers of Easter.” It was he, not Columbus, who found his way to the American continent. His discovery of Florida opened the way to future European settlement in North America. By most measures, his career should have been a great success.

  Ponce de León failed, however, in his overriding quest. On his second voyage, he was wounded by an Indian attack in Florida. He died from his wounds in Havana, Cuba, in 1521. The intrepid explorer, who did so much to chart the seas and lands of the Caribbean, never set eyes on the Fountain of Youth he sought so obsessively. Ironically, while Ponce de León was unable to drink the fabled elixir, his search has gained an immortality of its own. His quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth has become one of the most famous of all adventure tales.

  Juan Ponce de León, 1474–1521

  Sadly, though, little of the story is true.

  Ponce de León did sail with Columbus; he was governor of Puerto Rico; he set sail on expeditions with royal blessing in 1513 and again in 1521; and he did discover the Gulf Stream and Florida. Washington Irving’s riveting account of his search for the Fountain, though, has more in common with Irving’s other classic fables, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” than the actual voyage.

  Like his contemporaries and other successful men throughout history who have it all yet still want more, Ponce de León sought gold and new lands where he might be appointed governor. There is no evidence that he ever looked for or even knew about a Fountain of Youth. That romantic search was apparently fabricated by the Spanish court’s historian, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing fourteen years after Ponce de León’s death. Spicing up the story, Oviedo even claimed that the explorer had sought the Fountain to cure his sexual impotence (el enflaquecimiento del sexo). Oviedo’s failure to mention that Ponce de León took his mistress with him on the voyage, or that he was the father of four children, suggests he may have held a somewhat poor view of the conquistador. But why let facts get in the way of a good story?

  Subsequent historians took the search for the Fountain as given, some imputing the powers from drinking the waters, others from bathing in them. The myth is alive and well today. St. Augustine, Florida, boasts the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, where, according to its website, you can “Drink from the Legendary Fountain!”

  If the search for the Fountain of Youth was made up, then why has the story stuck around for so long? What is it about Juan Ponce de León’s mythical quest that has struck such a popular chord in successive generations for almost five hundred years?

  In part, the legend speaks to our shared longing for eternal youth, to our fear of aging and inevitable loss. How else to explain the attraction of cosmetics and plastic surgery to those approaching the far side of middle age? But the Fountain of Youth story resonates deeply within us for another reason. It draws from far older legends—stories of eternal youth, passages to the afterlife, miraculous cures, and mystical wisdom. In fact, drinking water myths appear in every culture, though with different meanings and in different contexts. These special waters serve as a medium to the supernatural, a means of connecting the physical and the metaphysical.

  This chapter explores our deepest relationships
with drinking water—those of myths and legends from around the world—from Babylon, Greece, and China to Ireland and India. In recounting these stories we learn not only about past cultures but something of how our current drinking water myths define visions of ourselves. For, to be sure, the mythmaking continues today. Just look at the market power of “natural” bottled waters, or at the millions of pilgrims who voyage to Lourdes, France, every year to take its holy waters.

  PONCE DE LEÓN’S QUEST FOR THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IS HARDLY the only legend of a special substance that renews youth. The first volume of the amazingly successful Harry Potter series follows the attempt by Lord Voldemort to seize the regenerative powers of the Sorceror’s Stone. Many of the eternal youth legends turn on drinking special waters as the means of renewal. These tales go back well before the time of Hogwarts or even the discovery of the New World. In fact, the earliest version goes back at least five thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia and the journey of Ishtar to the Underworld, one of the very oldest of recorded legends.

  Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, is grief-stricken over the death of her lover, Tammuz. Descending into the Underworld, she hopes to find Tammuz, resurrect him with the Water of Life, and return with him to the world of the living. During her descent, however, Ishtar must pass through seven gates. At the first gate, the guard demands she give up her crown; at the second gate, her earrings; at the third, her necklace, and so on until, upon passing the seventh gate, she stands naked. Ereshkigal, goddess of the Underworld, insulted by Ishtar’s willful descent into her domain, then afflicts her with all manners of disease. Thus is Ishtar gradually stripped of her clothing, flesh, and ultimately her life. With her death, fertility on earth ceases. No calves are born; no harvests are gathered. Only upon the entreaties of the other gods does Ereshkigal provide Ishtar the Water of Life and allow her to return, alone.