Thanks to a more conscious public and some sane legislation here and there, some aspects of the environment are becoming a tad more free of pollution and degradation. This is not the case with the tap water in my neighborhood. For at least five years, it's been undrinkable and now it's slowly becoming unshowerable.
Every so often, I run into someone with a mad on for environmentalists…someone who thinks they spread bogus warnings about disasters that are never going to happen and try to inconvenience people or businesses with preventing them. That's certainly so in some cases but not always. The many folks who warned us we were polluting our water supply were 100% dead-on right and the folks who insulted and mocked them were utterly wrong. We're all paying the price for not heeding that warning. There's now a $22 billion industry in this country selling bottled water…and that number doesn't even factor in what's being spent on filtration systems and Brita pitchers. I'm amazed people aren't more upset about this. But then I'm also amazed they don't do much more about high gas prices than pay them and grumble about it.
I resisted bottled water as long as I could…but when the liquid coming out of my faucets began to taste like I imagine kerosene tastes, it was time to go to the bottles.
Like most of you, I've tried just about every major brand. Happily, the one that tasted best to me was one of the cheapest — Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. The only negative about it, apart from the fact that I have to pay for bottled water at all, is that the largest size it comes in is the one gallon container. You can't buy or have them deliver a big five gallon jug like I need to put on my water cooler. For that, I have Sparketts delivered and it's okay…but most of the time, I swill Crystal Geyser out of half-liter bottles. Cheapest place I've found to buy them is Smart and Final when they run their occasional "buy two cases, get one free" sale. In addition to any health benefits I derive from the water, I get exercise lifting those 36 bottle cartons into and out of my car.
My Crystal Geyser water comes from a spring somewhere on or about Olancha Peak, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Other parts of the country get Crystal Geyser H2O that comes from other sources so I'm curious as to what it tastes like. Later this year, I'll be doing some travelling and I'm going to make a point of sampling, for example, the Crystal Geyser water from Benton, Tennessee where there's a protected source adjacent to the Cherokee National Forest, which is surrounded by the historic Blue Ridge Mountains. (In case you can't tell, I'm doing some cutting 'n' pasting from the Crystal Geyser website.)
I like the Crystal Geyser product but I'm sorry I have to pay and lug around plastic bottles to have drinkable water. When people tell me now that we're doing things that are making our air unbreathable, I think I'm going to take them more seriously. I'd hate to have to carry tanks around like I'm scuba diving everywhere I go. I have a feeling even that won't make some people think the environmentalists are ever right but we need to do something.