The next time you're thirsty, just turn on the tap

Recently NPR's Day to Day program featured an interview with Charles Fishman about his article "Message in a Bottle" published in Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html. According to Fishman, today's multi-billion dollar bottled water industry epitomizes the overwhelmingly indulgent nature of American society, "...our demand for instant gratification, our vanity, our token concern for health..." And in terms of the sheer environmental (read, "carbon emissions") impact of eschewing tap water in favor of a chilled plastic bottle which in many cases is, in fact, simply repackaged tap water, I heartily agree with him. And I say this as a former guilty-as-charged bottled water drinker. In my former life as a corporate employee, one of my workplace perks was free bottled water of a certain French moniker, which I greedily consumed while shunning the commonplace (but perfectly healthy) tap water. To my mind, I was a responsible environmentalist because I recycled my empty bottles, being woefully ignorant of the environmental impact of producing the plastic that housed the water, the fuel to ship cases of the stuff to my pampered officemates and myself, etc. . My employer's discontinuation of this thirst-quenching perk ended my bottled water consumption, but I'm pretty sure I'm still working off an enormous karmic debt for my wastefulness.

The salient point of the bottled-water-as-indulgence allegory is that our personal consumer choices have a huge impact on the world around us, even when they seem like harmless decisions. Many of us make wasteful choices innocently, and part of the challenge of mitigating global warming and treading more lightly upon the earth is simply learning about the wider impact of what we do...and what we buy. So the next time you reach for a bottle of water at the market, save yourself a bundle of money and shun the fancy packaging in favor of good, old-fashioned tap water. And save the planet a hefty load of carbon in the process.