Abstract
Review: The Sierra Club Guide to Safe Drinking Water By Scott Lewis Reviewed by Brad Fisher Pittsburgh, USA Lewis, Scott. The Sierra Club Guide to Safe Drinking Water. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. 110 pp. 5 appendices, 17 tables. US $10.00 paper ISBN 0-87156-355-X. Recycled, acid-free paper. Those of us old enough to remember back to the day in 1969 that the chemical-choked Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland can also remember a time--about the same period, actually--when people drank freely and without fear from household taps, public fountains and mountain streams. A time, in fact, when some people were so protective of their tap water that they questioned fluoridation as a Communist plot. It seems--or is it just nostalgia?--that while we as an industrial nation were fouling our commercial waterways to the point of disaster, we believed that our public drinking water was healthy and clean--and wilderness water was free of contaminants. Today the situation appears to be reversed: our rivers are recovering, dams and pollution rates are falling, and, miracle of miracles, great swarms of mayflies are hatching out of the once dead Lake Erie. Yet we handle our drinking water with surgical gloves. We filter, soften and treat the water from our taps. We spend $2.5 billion a year to buy it in bottles at the grocery store or have it delivered to our homes, paying more per gallon than we pay for gasoline. In offices, we bypass the ubiquitous wall cooler for the ubiquitous bubbler of bottled water. As consumers we now seek status through our choice of branded 'spring' water, much of which is nothing more than somebody's municipal water run through another filter and decorated with a nice label. What happened? Perhaps, while we've been focusing on the highly visible pollution that abounds in our rivers and lakes, we've overlooked the invisible contaminants that slip through the cracks in our municipal water systems. The water's always been clear. How could it not be drinkable? Scott Lewis answers this question with hard facts in The Sierra Club Guide to Safe Drinking Water, a calm, well-organized nuts-and-bolts
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