Private Water vs. Public Water

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USAToday.com published an article talking about how water went from a free commodity to a privatized industry via the bottled water giants. The article has some good points in it, but I couldn’t understand this one:

It’s a dangerous state of affairs, Royte explains, because degrading water systems will decrease consumers’ trust in tap water and increase purchases of bottled water: “Opting out of public water in favor of private isn’t going to help preserve — or improve — municipal water supplies, but preserve them we must: too many people can afford to drink nothing but.”

Maybe I just don’t understand the structure of this sentence, but if one is to opt out of using municipal water supplies in favor of private water supplies, then how is that person not preserving the municipal water supply? Go ahead, re-read the sentence. See what I mean? If I’m not drinking water from Source A, then does Source A have more water in it than it would have if I drank from there?

This is getting too close to a weird math problem for my liking, so back to the article!

I once saw a presentation that talked about the lack of potable water supplies in third world countries. Really, it’s a shame when you think about how many people in the world do not have the luxury of getting up and going to the store to get some water. Of course I would argue that before we - as Americans and socially conscious humans - take care of the third world, we should take care of our own folks in this country. There are areas of the rural south in Kentucky, for example, that do not have potable water. We need to help them first.

Take a read of the article on USAToday.com, I think it’s interesting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Sustainable Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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