Salon.com recently published an interesting interview with Elizabeth Royte, the author of a new book called Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.
It’s definitely worth a read, I think. One of the biggest takeaways from it is the fact that the whole “8 cups of water a day” maxim isn’t so much a myth as a misinterpretation that’s been promulgated by the water industry: yes, we need 8 cups of water a day, but we already get most of it from the water contained in the food we eat. And as with most environmentally and ethically-conscious texts, it looks like this one ultimately prescribes a local solution: get your water locally, whether it’s from a tap or—if you’re in a place that has extremely poor public water—a bottle.
I don’t really consider myself to be an environmentalist, but I really like the idea of “staying local”. For me, it’s largely just an issue of understanding small, simple systems versus enormous, complex ones. It’s also an issue of observability. Things immediately around you are easier to perceive and understand the nature of; it’s relatively straightforward to know whether the people in your community are happy with something, because they’re your friends and neighbors and you can talk to them. One of the most startling realizations I had in college while researching the issue of sweatshops was that there was actually no way for me to truly know whether people who worked in sweatshops were unhappy that they had their job without either going to the affected area and seeing things for myself or doing an enormous amount of research; otherwise, any single account portraying a positive picture could be dismissed as corporate propaganda, while authors of negative portrayals could have their own agendas. And either way, reading reams of journalistic accounts in an effort to obtain a balanced perspective or traveling the world myself would be a huge time investment. Much easier, and far more satisfying, would be to simply obtain my clothing from someone I knew and trusted, who obtained their raw materials from someone they knew and trusted, and so on.
This isn’t to say that one should be blind to the things that are affecting the globe, of course, because ultimately the things that happen around the world do affect us whether we like it or not. It’s rather that whenever I read things like this interview, I become acutely aware that it is by no means a trivial matter to be certain of what’s true and what’s not in today’s world, especially as the players become more aware of what people find truthful and use it to manipulate people to their own ends. A recent book by Farhad Manjoo called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society seems to address this issue, and I think I may pick it up soon.
My name is Atul Varma, and I'm the co-founder of a small Chicago company called 
I also read an article somewhere that stated that plastic bottled water unavoidably contains a little oil in the water because of the plastic. Wish those filters weren’t so pricey, not to mention how being a renter complicates the problem.
The epistemological aspect of this reminds me of post-structuralism. That is, that we frame the world based on narratives, and then perceive things in that structure not just in terms of Seeing The Truth and Determining Fact. But then I hate post-structuralists… thinking about it, maybe it’s because they claimed to be “post” this kind of structural thought, when in fact they just became their own (rather stupid) subculture that framed their thought based on this philosophical tradition.
In this specific case of “buy local” there is also a potential flaw. It’s easy to pick on bottled water because bottled water is completely stupid, but extending that to other “buy local” ideas isn’t necessarily correct. Honestly I don’t even know where my water comes from — Lake Michigan, I guess, via some complex infrastructure. It’s not like I buy it from my local water merchant. Basically local water is an industrial-scale operation.
From what I’ve been told, local food isn’t quite so beneficial. Some even feel it can be negative in some cases, when the most efficient place for a kind of food is located far away. E.g., broccoli grown in California and shipped to Illinois might be more efficient than trying to grow broccoli locally. In part this may be because of the more industrial scale of farming when it is specialized. Of course there’s other problems with farming specialization, and so maybe there are problems.
Generally I think the only reasonable way to determine what makes sense is to tax externalities — i.e., tax carbon output, charge reasonably for resources like irrigation water, maybe try to get people to do long-term accounting that takes into account things like exhausting the nutrients in the land, etc. Then we can use our normal judgments that take into account value and price when choosing an item, and do so environmentally.
Growing corn for gasoline is also one of the those truthy ideas that is probably a bad idea overall, since we use energy to grow the corn and more importantly, a good bit of the land added for farming ends up coming from forests.
If our own fields are converted to growing corn for fuel, then Brazilian farmers take up the slack for other crops and cut down the Amazon rain forest. The net effect is a lot more carbon in the atmosphere.