The Montpelier Spring Water Company had approached the East Montpelier select board and the Montpelier City Council with a proposal to pipe water from a large spring in East Montpelier to a bottling plant in Montpelier. Townspeople, alerted to the situation, quickly composed a petition requesting a three-year moratorium on such proposals so their environmental impacts could be evaluated and state legislative action pursued to define the status of groundwater; viz., is it the property of the landowner under which it sits or flows, or is it a public trust? The petition gathered the 200 signatures required to place it on the town warrant, and in retrospect it’s probable there would have been a huge turnout even without a Presidential primary.

Feelings clearly ran high, but the rhetoric didn’t. I’ve rarely heard a debate so civil on an issue about which so many felt passionately. It was clear the petitioners felt threatened by the idea of industrial-size water extraction, especially given the recent history of large corporations –Pepsi, Coke, and Nestlé –swallowing up small spring water bottlers. The opponents argued that existing state laws are already adequate to protect natural resources, and that exhaustive reviews would guarantee responsible extraction. The subtext of that argument was that some of those advancing it were not totally disinterested parties.

Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments was made by a former town moderator, too lame to get easily to the microphone, but blessed with a voice that carried easily throughout the auditorium, who stated, not without some evident regret, that he no longer trusted government at any level to protect him, and that a local effort to ascertain the implications of the bottling would be the most likely to produce the truth and protect everyone’s interests. Nobody, he declared, ever was hurt by information. The moratorium resolution passed easily. Interestingly, several younger members of the crowd who I noted voted for it were cradling bottles of water of various brands.

Equally interesting, but not within the purview of either the resolution or Town Meeting, is the debate about the environmental impact of bottled water in general. There’s no doubt that its use has become a fad and a social phenomenon; most teenagers carry a bottles with classy labels as if they were fashion accessories (and I’d bet the majority are filled, after their initial draining, with tap water). Backpacks feature double water holsters, and it’s probably only a matter of time before the hydration bladders in some backpacks will be produced by Dasani or Poland Spring.

The hype and advertising surrounding bottled water are no doubt extending the life of its popularity, but it is devoutly to be wished that it ends soon, because the water is not safer than tap water; regulations governing its purity are much less stringent than those for municipal water supplies. The bottles may after several weeks of storage leach chemicals into the water –chemicals which are limited in tap water, but (thanks to lobbying by the industry) not in bottled water. The energy required to produce, package, and ship it adds significantly to global warming pollution. And only about 13% of the plastic bottles are recycled, so billions of them end up in landfills.

On top of all that, it’s very difficult –in case you’re interested –to determine where a bottle of water has come from. Some of the company logos and romantic illustrations suggest high mountains and fresh-flowing streams. “Pure glacier water from the last unpolluted frontier, bacteria free,” claimed the ads for Alasika Alaska Premium Drinking Water. But it apparently came from a municipal water supply. Furthermore, if you ever encounter “pure glacier water,” I guarantee you won’t drink it unless there’s no reasonable alternative. It’s loaded with either sand and gravel or “rock powder,” which makes it resemble a weak solution of milk of magnesia. It often produces the same results.

“Taking the waters” was popular 150 years ago. The famous and wealthy flocked to Saratoga Springs (ex-President Grant), Poland Spring (Mae West), and other resorts and spas whose advertising claimed medicinal, anti-rheumatic, or (in the case of Poland Spring) aphrodisiac properties. When I became a Tenderfoot Scout, some sixty years ago, I had to pass an initiation of drinking a large cup of white sulfur water from a running spring full of waving filaments of white algae. It was reputed to clear the blood. What it cleared was the brain; the resolution required to raise that noisome cup, and then down it as fast as possible, concentrated the mind wonderfully.

At the town meeting the other day, someone described northern New England to me as “the Saudi Arabia of water.” There’s something to that. Yet someday even Saudi Arabia will be out of oil. And even though popular wisdom says that our aquifers and climate will never fail us, we have to remember that not many years ago popular wisdom also claimed there were so many old-growth white pines that we’d never cut them all. Very few of us now alive have ever seen one. It’s critical that we protect our water now, from its sources to the sea. Literally billions of people in the world don’t have access to safe water. Never think that it couldn’t happen here.