Drinking Water

What does it mean to truly drink water? In Drinking Water, James Salzman argues that water is not simply H₂O flowing through pipes—it is one of humanity’s oldest mirrors, reflecting religion, politics, commerce, and belief. Salzman shows that how you perceive, value, and secure drinking water has always revealed far more about societies than about chemistry. His narrative blends mythic symbolism and public policy, market economics and moral vision, tracing how water moves from divine gift to global commodity.

The spiritual and cultural foundation

From Ishtar’s descent to Mimir’s spring, the ancient world saw water as both portal and promise—a source of renewal, knowledge, and healing. Stories of the Water of Life, the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, and the Lourdes miracles gave water enduring metaphysical weight. When millions of pilgrims or tourists today still seek holy wells or bottled “Lourdes water,” they tap into timeless associations of purity and grace. Salzman’s point is simple but profound: your trust in a clear liquid often depends more on stories than on lab results.

The political and legal struggle over access

Throughout history, the key question has been who gets to drink. Religious laws such as the Jewish “Right of Thirst” and Islamic principles of sharing established water as a communal necessity. Roman emperors, by contrast, fused politics with plumbing: aqueducts fed both public fountains and private pipes, and citizens read political legitimacy in the grandeur of flowing water. These ancient systems prefigured modern debates about privatization, public service, and pricing. Salzman’s narrative—from Aaron Burr’s specious Manhattan Company to New York’s Croton Aqueduct—shows that balancing equity and efficiency has never been easy.

Defining safety and confronting modern risks

Salzman next asks how societies decide when water is “safe.” He traces four essential pillars: locate reliable sources, protect them, treat the water, and maintain clean distribution. From Venice’s rainwater cisterns to twentieth-century chlorination, science continually reshapes what “safe” means. Yet, even as filtration and disinfection eradicated cholera and typhoid, new hazards like arsenic, endocrine disruptors, and pharmaceuticals revived the uncertainty. Detection technology races ahead of regulation, forcing governments and citizens to weigh invisible risks against immense costs.

Commerce, marketing, and cultural reinvention

By the time you reach modern bottled water, Salzman reveals an uncanny continuity with the sacred past. Springs and spa waters—Vichy, Évian, Bath—were once medicinal pilgrimages; Perrier’s green bottle merely secularized the relic. Marketing completes the alchemy: Perrier’s “Champagne of Waters” and Evian’s alpine purity prove that you often buy stories, not molecules. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, mass distribution, and branding transformed water into fashion accessory and global economic force. Bottled water’s image of safety and glamour thrives even when municipal tap systems are safer, cheaper, and more transparent.

Environmental, ethical, and political reckonings

Across his chapters, Salzman tracks how bottled water intertwines with larger crises—plastic waste, corporate extraction, aquifer depletion, and the commodification of life’s essence. Cases from McCloud, California, to Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Argentina’s privatized reforms expose tensions between efficiency, equity, and sovereignty. International recognition of a human right to water contrasts with failures of domestic governance, reminding you that the central moral question of water is never merely technical: it is about fairness, dignity, and trust.

Adapting for the future

Finally, Salzman points forward. In an age of scarcity, you can transport water across continents, desalinate oceans, recycle wastewater, or reform habits. Yet the first challenge is not engineering but imagination: to see water as both infrastructure and culture, commodity and right. The book closes where it began—with the act of drinking as communion. Every sip embodies centuries of myth, politics, and design choices. Knowing that makes water, even from the tap, a marvel worth reverence and scrutiny.

Across time and civilizations, water has symbolized more than survival—it has stood for rebirth, purity, and power. Salzman explores myths and rituals that transform ordinary springs into sacred thresholds. The epic search for the Fountain of Youth, Khidr’s spring of eternal life in Islamic lore, and Odin’s sacrifice at Mimir’s well all testify to humanity’s faith that water transcends the physical. This sacredness permeates modern life, shaping how you perceive purity and trust in water today.

Religious continuity

Water rituals—baptism, ablution, pilgrimage—embody spiritual transformation. Lourdes in France, where Bernadette Soubirous’s visions created a site of healing, now attracts millions, blending devotion with tourism and commerce. Even standardized Catholic investigation of miracles demonstrates how belief can coexist with institutional rigor. Salzman uses Lourdes to illustrate how faith and bureaucracy meet through water.

Modern echoes in consumer culture

In today’s bottled-water industry, centuries-old imagery persists. Evian and Aquafina rely on mountain, spring, and purity motifs that tap collective memory of sanctity. Spiritual branding—from McCloud’s “vortex” narratives to New Age “energy water”—demonstrates how economic demand and longing for transcendence fuse. You see that water’s dual identity—as commodity and conduit to the divine—still drives both faith and commerce.

When you ask who should control water, you face questions of justice, survival, and sovereignty. Salzman reconstructs the moral geography of water rights—from divine gift to market good. Ancient and religious traditions converged on one principle: denying water to the thirsty was sin. The “Right of Thirst” in Jewish law and the shared access mandated in Sharia illustrate how early societies recognized that water, unlike land, cannot be withheld without imperiling life itself.

Historical precedents and mixed systems

Rome balanced private and collective use: free fountains for citizens alongside taxed private conduits. That duality—public right supported by private finance—resurfaces in modern infrastructure. New York’s 19th-century transition from Burr’s corrupt Manhattan Company to the public Croton Aqueduct reaffirmed that equitable access was essential to legitimacy and health. Salzman uses these examples to demonstrate that water governance always blends moral duty with fiscal pragmatism.

Privatization, protest, and hybrid solutions

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century battles over privatization—especially Cochabamba’s uprising against Bechtel and Argentina’s mixed results with private utilities—show that ideological purity rarely ensures results. Private systems can expand access and efficiency yet risk exclusion and unrest. Rights-based frameworks, such as those enshrined in South Africa’s constitution and India’s court rulings, affirm water as part of the right to life but face fiscal and operational challenges. Salzman urges you to assess performance, not ideology: does the system deliver sustainable, affordable water to all?

(Contextually, this debate mirrors global tensions between neoliberal markets and human-rights governance frameworks—each claiming justice, each limited without the other.)

What does “safe water” actually mean? Salzman insists the definition is dynamic—a social contract between science, infrastructure, and trust. Safety depends on four interlocking processes: locating sources, protecting them, treating water, and maintaining clean distribution. Failure at any stage destroys the illusion of safety.

From wells to chlorination

Throughout history, safe drinking depended first on reliable sources: wells in Mesopotamia, Venice’s rain-harvesting cisterns, Jerusalem’s tunnels. But as cities grew, waste and disease followed. Sanitation revolutions—from Rome’s Cloaca Maxima to Victorian sewers—emerged to separate water from filth. The 20th-century adoption of sand filtration and chlorination reduced epidemics and made municipal water trustworthy, collapsing the old bottled-water market.

Trade-offs and modern challenges

Yet each fix created new anxieties. Chlorine eliminated typhoid but spawned chemical by-products linked to long-term cancer risks. Industrialization brought invisible toxins—arsenic, nitrates, endocrine disruptors—demanding new detection technologies and risk calculus. Even highly developed systems remain fallible; Milwaukee’s 1993 Cryptosporidium crisis proved treatment and monitoring must continually evolve. Salzman reframes “safety” not as a static standard but as an active, contested process of balancing known benefits against emerging perils.

Security and vigilance

Beyond microbes and chemicals lies the threat of deliberate or accidental contamination. Vulnerable infrastructure, from small-town towers to global pipelines, demands constant monitoring. The Bioterrorism Act’s mandated vulnerability assessments and new real-time sensors reflect a truth Salzman emphasizes repeatedly: water safety depends as much on vigilance and public investment as on technology itself.

If water is free and ubiquitous, why do billions buy it? Salzman dismantles the bottled-water phenomenon by tracing its origins in pilgrimage and spa culture. Medieval pilgrims sealed flasks from St. Menas’s well to prove authenticity—centuries later, Perrier and Evian sell the same idea of provenance and sanctity, only wrapped in glass or plastic. This historical throughline exposes bottled water as a triumph of storytelling, not chemistry.

From sacred flask to global brand

Early spa bottlings—Poland Spring (1845), Vittel (1855), Deer Park (1873)—sold health and elite identity. Chlorination once killed this luxury niche; then, in the late 20th century, marketing resurrected it. Perrier’s 1970s campaign, riding fitness trends, turned elitist water into fashionable habit. Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi followed with Aquafina and Dasani, focusing on convenience and consistency rather than terroir. PET plastic bottles—cheap, light, portable—completed the transformation.

Regulation versus perception

Ironically, municipal tap water is regulated far more rigorously than many bottled brands. The EPA oversees utilities with constant testing and public disclosure, while FDA’s fragmented rules cover only interstate products. Studies in Cleveland and by NRDC found bottling lapses and occasional contaminants, including benzene in Perrier’s 1990 recall. Consumers, however, buy the illusion of safety packaged in sleek design. Salzman’s insight: bottled water sells trust, not purity.

Decline of public fountains

Public infrastructure paid the cultural price. As free fountains disappeared and bottled convenience spread, drinking water shifted from public good to private choice. Universities and stadiums built without fountains, such as UCF’s bottle-only stadium, exemplify this shift. Salzman invites you to see every plastic bottle as both personal purchase and civic abdication.

Behind every disposable bottle lies hidden environmental and political cost. Manufacturing PET containers requires petroleum and water; worldwide recycling rates remain poor, meaning billions of bottles become waste or pollution. Transportation multiplies emissions: importing Fiji or Evian water burns fuel that undercuts their own claims of purity. Salzman’s analysis turns bottled water into a case study in externalized environmental harm.

Local exploitation and backlash

The same dynamic animates local extraction disputes. McCloud, California’s fight against Nestlé’s planned 520-million-gallon-per-year bottling project crystallized tensions between jobs and ecology. Opponents framed the issue as stewardship and communal identity, arguing a “penny-for-gallons” deal traded the town’s spiritual and physical lifeblood. Across regions, bottled-water projects raise similar fears of privatized commons.

Greenwashing and civic reform

Corporate environmental gestures—lightweight bottles, “carbon-negative” promises—often mask deeper impacts. Civic responses, from university bans to “Take Back the Tap” campaigns, demonstrate growing consumer activism. Salzman reads these movements not just as environmental protest but as moral reawakening: a return to recognizing water as shared inheritance rather than private product.

His conclusion is pragmatic and hopeful: meaningful change begins when citizens carry reusable bottles, demand transparency, and hold both corporations and governments accountable for the true cost of convenience.

In the final movement of Salzman’s book, the question shifts from history to survival: how will societies secure water for growing populations on a finite planet? He catalogues experiments that blend technology, finance, and ecology—from ocean desalination to “toilet-to-tap” recycling and social-enterprise filtration sachets. Each method carries trade-offs in cost, energy, or public acceptance.

The politics of moving and making water

Bulk transfers like tanker shipments or interbasin pipelines spark political fury—as the aborted Nova Group export from Lake Superior shows. Desalination creates new water but devours energy and produces toxic brine. Recycling, particularly indirect potable reuse (as in Singapore’s NEWater or Orange County’s aquifer recharge), proves more efficient yet faces psychological resistance. Salzman calls this “the yuck factor”—an emotional barrier as powerful as any technical constraint.

Small-scale success and stewardship

At smaller scales, point-of-use devices—ceramic filters, chlorine sachets, solar disinfectants—deliver dramatic health gains in poor regions. NGOs like PSI and Charity: Water translate global generosity into measurable local outcomes. Meanwhile, cities such as New York invest upstream in watershed protection (the Catskill-Delaware system) because preserving ecosystems often beats the cost of treatment plants. Salzman concludes that prevention, local empowerment, and social finance can extend safe drinking water faster than grand engineering alone.

You finish the story understanding that every approach—market, rights, or technological—requires humility. Water, he reminds you, connects myth and molecule, self and society. To drink wisely in the 21st century is to balance reverence with responsibility.