A) How is fighting rebels an abdication of responsibility? and B) I’m guessing you personally have never seen true poverty. (Either that, or you are in fact the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette.)
Personally I don’t think bottled water is immoral, but in the cases of the third world countries mentioned above, the people who really need it are in absolutely no way going to be able to afford it, which kind of negates Renob’s postulate that corporations are providing services that their governments are unable to.
The tap water in Santa Barbara is nasty tasting. I have a large charcoal filter system that I had installed to filter all of the water before it gets into my house. Now it tastes the same as bottled water but I assure you that anyone could tell the difference between unfiltered Santa Barbara tap and bottled water. I even did a blind test with my wife to see if the filter would make a difference and it clearly did.
That’s what I would use…I think glass pretty much doesn’t deteriorate, and in any case, glass is at least made from natural substances, not chemicals of unknown origin, so I would probably feel safer with glass.
The problem here is with the privatization of natural resources. And the focus is not really the first world, but the huge bottled water consumption among the elites of countries without access to safe water.
When you own a farm, and Coca Cola decides to build a water plant over your aquifer and the water level drops, you are no longer a farmer. Which means what? You abandon your land and move to search for work in the city, losing your way of life, breaking up your family, and ending up in a slum with a million people who are in the same boat. Not good. Being poor sucks, but being poor and landless (or not having access to fertile land) sucks one hundred times more.
Arundati Roy’s article “The Greater Common Good” is an excellent introduction to the problems that come out of water privitization.
Another element that was not mentioned is water bottle waste. I’ve seen first hand the beautiful mountain valleys of the Himelayas are filled with empty water bottle from rich tourists. It’s not quite a problem yet here in Africa, where used bottles are the primary way of selling gasoline and palm oil, but the day is coming.
Honestly here I don’t even know what would happen if they tried to start privitizing water. Most people are small substinance farmers that are hard pressed to save the money to drill a well- gathering water is one of the primary problems in life and one of the big reasons, for example, why many girls do not make it to school. A bottle of water costs about an average person’s daily salary- it’s the same price as beer. Even I cannot afford to drink it daily. If ANYTHING more happens to make water scarce, even a little bit, a lot of people will be in really bad shape.