Uncorking The Bottled Water Battle

This was posted yesterday on our sister blog, The Green Fork, by Kerry Trueman. Tonight, in honor of World Water Day,  Kerry will be holding a live Vokle chat with Story Of Stuff creator Annie Leonard and Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It. Tune in to the Huffington Post at 8pm for the chat, they will be taking questions too!

Monday was a momentous day, thanks to the historic, histrionic passage of health care reform. Lack of access to adequate health care kills an estimated 20,000 to 45,000 Americans annually, so here’s hoping that the health care bill will stem that terrible tide.

But Monday was also World Water Day, a fact that pretty much fell through the cracks. And that’s a shame, because access to safe, clean drinking water is essential to good health, and the lack of it kills millions of people all over the world each year. As a UN report released yesterday entitled Sick Water noted, “the sheer scale of dirty water means more people now die from contaminated and polluted water than from all forms of violence including wars.”

Ironically, those of us who have relatively safe drinking water are the ones buying up all the bottled water that’s become the bane of environmentalists. Annie Leonard, the force of nature who brought us the wildly successful Story of Stuff video (and her new book by the same name), explores this perplexing trend in her latest video, The Story of Bottled Water, released yesterday to coincide with World Water Day.

I’ll be discussing the bottled water phenomenon with Leonard tomorrow evening in a live interactive webcast at 8 pm EST. We’ll be joined by Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water. Please tune in and join the conversation!