A few Fridays ago, on a whim, I went to see Urinetown: The Musical, performed by the Victoria College Drama Society. I knew the story had something to do with people having to pay to pee, but as I sat in the theatre and the drama unfolded, I was thrilled that, two weeks before World Water Day (March 22), I had stumbled across a musical about the privatization of our water resources.
Urinetown takes place in a city that has experienced a drought for quite some time, and in order to preserve what little water there is, a large for-profit corporation has taken control of all the bathrooms and forced people to pay every time they need to relieve themselves. One particularly memorable song featured the lyric, “It’s a privilege to pee.” As the audience sat and chuckled, I thought back to a time two years ago, when I was working in a small Mexican village called Cuentepec.
One of my coworkers was feeling sick and needed to find a bathroom before his breakfast ended up in the middle of the village square. We quickly popped into the community centre, only to be told that he simply could not use the bathroom there, as there was no water to flush. After some quick negotiating, he was allowed to go in as long as we agreed to dump the water from our Nalgene bottles into the tank, to flush the toilet. And so, while the audience members laughed at the absurdity of limiting urination to those who could afford it, I understood all too clearly that for too many people around the world, what we consider to be a right really is a privilege.
I belong to the U of T Student Christian Movement, and one of our projects for the winter semester has been to raise awareness about the current water shortage crisis that our world is facing, and to examine the ways in which our lifestyle choices may be helping to bring about this impending catastrophe.
One issue we have found particularly interesting is the role the bottled water industry has played in encouraging the privatization of an increasingly dwindling resource. In fact, this industry has been deemed so harmful to equitable water-sharing practices that a number of Christian churches across Canada have called on their members to boycott the product entirely, and for good reason.
The bottled water industry has a long list of sins to answer for: price gouging, manipulative marketing techniques, the use of ecologically threatening packaging, and luring people away from low-cost public tap water. It is perhaps this last charge that is the most dangerous, for, through cunning marketing methods, the bottled water industry is deceiving its consumers into believing that our publicly provided water is unfit for consumption. What is more, they are asserting that their water product is the safer choice. However, according to a study by the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council, one-third of 103 brands of bottled water tested contained traces of arsenic, E. coli, and other contaminants. One-quarter of all bottled water, including Coca-Cola’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina, is actually taken from the tap, and in many countries, bottled water is subjected to less rigorous testing than apparently “hazardous” tap water.
In the late 1990s and into the new millennium, bottled water represented health and trendiness. However, new evidence suggests that what it really symbolizes is corporate greed and public gullibility to the highest degree. Why are people willingly lining up to purchase what they can otherwise obtain for free? With the right marketing techniques, could bottled air enjoy the same success?
And so, in the spirit of World Water Day, I challenge each of you reading this article to examine what compels you to purchase bottled water, to become enraged at the marketing techniques that insult our intelligence, and to boycott the product in favour of your health, your pocketbook, and your social conscience.
If we don’t do this now, all too soon we may find that we have unwittingly turned over control of our safe, low cost, publicly provided water to the willing hands of for-profit corporations. We will have put ourselves in the same situation as the characters in Urinetown: crying for the privilege to pee, to drink, and merely to survive.
Melanie Murphy is Student Coordinator of the U of T Student Christian Movement.
