How to Read Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water RTF
Peter Gleick knows water. A world-renowned scientist andfreshwater expert, Gleick is a MacArthur Foundation "genius," andaccording to the BBC, an environmental visionary. And he drinks from thetap. Why don't the rest of us? Bottled and Sold shows how water wentfrom being a free natural resource to one of the most successfulcommercial products of the last one hundred years-and why we are poorerfor it. It's a big story and water is big business. Every second ofevery day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottleof water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one ofthose bottles away. That adds up to more than thirty billion bottles ayear and tens of billions of dollars of sales. Are there legitimatereasons to buy all those bottles? With a scientist's eye and a naturalstoryteller's wit, Gleick investigates whether industry claims about therelative safety, convenience, and taste of bottled versus tap holdwater. And he exposes the true reasons we've turned to the bottle, fromfearmongering by business interests and our own vanity to the breakdownof public systems and global inequities. "Designer" H2O may belaughable, but the debate over commodifying water is deadly serious. Itcomes down to society's choices about human rights, the role ofgovernment and free markets, the importance of being "green," andfundamental values. Gleick gets to the heart of the bottled water craze,exploring what it means for us to bottle and sell our most basicnecessity.
