Have you ever stopped to think about how absolutely ridiculous and wasteful the consumption of bottled water is? I can only think of two reasons for this completely irrational behavior.
Bottled water
image by Myrtle Beach TheDigitel - source: Flickr
Reason one is that we collectively admit to having suspicions about the quality of tap-water; we don't trust the water that flows from our faucets. Reason two is the same, only from the other direction; we buy in to the belief that bottled water is somehow special, that it's "extra healthy" due to it coming from some spring and containing some special minerals or something similar. Since our health is worth a lot to us, either of those two reasons has made us value bottled water more than gasoline; a gallon of bottled aqua is way more expensive than a gallon of unleaded.
Look, the mere fact that water is somehow now someone's private property should make you jump up and cry out in anger. I don't really care how much confidence you have in the ability of markets to regulate whatever: some things have no price because they belong to no one, because they belong to everybody!! Is nothing save from the bottomless pit of capitalist's hunger for MORE? Apparently not. What's next? Breathable air sold in cans? G*@!!@##$% Ooohh I'm so mad right now...
Breathe... Okay, I've calmed down a bit. We've managed to make water scarce. Unbelievable. We can desalinate water, turn salt water into fresh, drinkable water. Only the for profit economy dictates we don't do it because there's nothing to be gained there. Nothing to be gained. Stay calm... To illustrate how bad capitalism is in actually managing an efficient use of the planet's resources, I'm going to use snippets from a May 2016 interview with Rajendra Singh a well-known water conservationist & environmentalist from Alwar district, Rajasthan in India, also known as "waterman of India":
You’ve often criticized states for taking a top-down, infrastructure-led approach to water management. Are governments generally supportive of alternative community-led initiatives? Is political and corporate support necessary?
RS: Governments usually don’t support community initiatives—they support contractors, not communities. The government always likes big projects in the name of combating desertification or rejuvenating the landscape: big dams, big canals, centralized irrigation water systems, pipeline drinking water systems. They create new canals even when the old canals are dry. There is no community participation in these projects. Every type of work is given to a contractor now. It is a contractor-driven democracy, not a people-driven democracy.
Or a plutocracy in other words. This is what's happening world-wide; everywhere drinking water is being privatized, just like anything else nowadays. I've watched the talks from the 2012 World Economic Forum last week or so, and it's just astonishing how capitalists are always looking for new ways to make money. Yahoo was talking there to and the representative did nothing but explaining ways how to make money by selling peoples' search-result-data to other big companies. You are the product that's being sold there. So naturally water is there to make money, not a necessity of life, just another commodity to throw among the sharks in the marketplace...
A well in the western Indian state of Gujarat is mobbed during a 2003 drought.
image by Reuters/Amit Dave - source: Quartz Media
What role can regulation play in conservation? Do you think privatizing water is a good way to promote its efficient use?
RS: If we really think about legal changes, we have to first think about river rights, or the rights of nature, and only then about water rights for humans. This type of thinking doesn’t exist today but we need this kind of legal framework that assures that the land of the river is only for the river, that the flow of the river is kept clean, and that the river has greenery on both banks to prevent erosion and silting. Only with all these factors can we ensure that rivers are healthy and only then that we are healthy.
This question is the age-old excuse for capitalism and privatization: if someone owns something, so the theory goes, they'll be responsible for it and take care of it. Ownership is, according to this stupid theory, a safeguard against neglect. Because you maintain and clean your car and your backyard, the same is assumed for all kinds of ownership, which is a total fallacy of course. Or have you never seen neglected cars, houses or backyards, or heard of big industries polluting like there's no tomorrow? So the answer is a resounding NO.
The answer given by Rajendra Singh on the other hand is a wise one: it's time we start granting nature its own rights. When we dam a river, we damn all life and crops downstream. We violate their right to live. But I digress, again... It's just so crazy I literally start trembling thinking about what we let happen to the planet and our fellow humans, all in the name of a failing socioeconomic ideology. You can read the rest of the interview here, and I'll go on about the rest of this clear liquid madness...
And Now We Bottle It...
Even here in the "civilized" west we manage to screw up distribution of the planet's most abundant resource. Because somehow the world's largest water companies, the biggest being Nestle, have managed to make you all drink water from a plastic bottle. Below I'm going to link the entire documentary "Tapped", in which you can see how this water-industry works, and how destructive this modern habit of ours really is.
One of the most obvious results of the billions of bottles sold every year is the enormous pollution by discarded plastic. Entire floating plastic islands are forming in our oceans; watch the video at the very end.
Now, ask yourself, why has tap-water become so bad? I know from experience that there's a wide variation in taste and quality of the water from faucets in different places on the planet. Why? Because this is regulated not by democratic- but market-principles. The quality will be as good or bad as supply and demand dictates and nothing else. Please, consider how entirely ridiculous this is. I've said it before and I'll say it again, and again and again: there's almost nothing we can't do. That mission to Mars is nothing for us as a species, we're that good and smart. If only the economy would allow it...: we're also that stupid.
Food is already lost to us, as a few giant corporations manage all our food and make all the money from it by overproducing and destroying half of it to keep prices up: we make enough to feed the world population twice, but capitalism needs scarcity, so we destroy the surplus instead of feeding the hungry. Let's please wake up before water really becomes the thing we fight over in World War 3. Or air: I wasn't joking at the start.
Here's the link to the documentary "Tapped". If you have never seen it before, please take the time sometime to watch it, even if it is more than an hour long: I'm almost positive you'll come away a little bit sobered up about that most common stuff on this planet:
I'm sorry if I was a bit less coherent than you're used to from me. I really get wound up when confronted with the paradoxical dilemma's this economy keeps throwing at us. What's especially maddening is the blatant disregard for our collective future, or the future of life in general on this planet. It's time we made clear that some things aren't for trade because they belong to all life on earth. And please, please don't fall for those age-old "wisdoms" that say things like "if everybody is responsible, no one is" or "if it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one". Some things do belong to everybody, and that means we decide together, we call that a democracy. The planet belongs to all of us, and no one else.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Ocean Pollution Awareness
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