It’s World Water Day, which means there’s no better day to, um, pour yourself a glass of water and, uh, dive into our planet’s dismal water problems.
Let’s not kids ourselves: If we’re going to learn about water use, we’re going to need snappy videos with animation and peppy music. There’s just no other way to casually dip into issues like contaminated runoff, gray-water reuse techniques, falling water tables—woah hey, stay with me here.
Fortunately, two such videos came out today. Annie Leonard–creator of the viral consumerism-takedown video The Story of Stuff–offers The Story of Bottled Water. The video shows how the bottled-water industry manufactured a fake problem so it could sell a solution, and it teases out the environmental and human costs:
And the ocean-protecting Surfrider Foundation offers The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water about the larger broken water cycle, which pollutes peopled habitats, harms marine life, creates floods and droughts, etc, etc. Here’s the trailer:
Some related stuff that isn’t dry:
- Leonard talked to Ask Umbra this month about the surge of interest in The Story of Stuff.
- Dave pointed out the problems with Leonard’s Story of Cap-and-Trade video from last fall.
- Steve Solomon, who wrote the book on Water, told me why water is the new oil (which used to the new water), and why resource intelligence is the way to go.
- Solomon argued why water scarcity fuels political instability in places like Yemen and Pakistan.
- I’ll plug David James Duncan’s magnificent book My Story as Told by Water any chance I can.
- Ask Umbra just basically has a lot of good advice about smart water use.
