WATER IS SILKY, dense, and poetic stuff. It’s cohesive, yet it parts under pressure, eluding touch. On a recent trip to hot springs on the Peninsula, I had the opportunity to think about this. The delicate, sulphurous mist hanging above the pools was a substance that fit no category: Almost liquid, yet, airborne, it was inhalable in its thousands of little microdots. The delicate mist’s layers captured light and fell into diving currents, pulled by wind. Water is an indelible, continuous link between plants, animals, and everything alive; this taut configuration seems at once startling as a dream and astonishingly real. At the same time, water is a frank necessity.
Increasingly, publications like The New York Times, Harper’s, and the World Watch Institute’s magazine are running print about the global freshwater crisis, in which shortages are paralyzing economies and compromising human health in China, Pakistan, and other countries that are unaccustomed to drought. Shortages impact the US, too; in the Northwest, boom development has depleted local aquifers, and some housing construction has been halted in Eastern Washington due to water shortages.
It’s enough to make you thirst for another world. If the water crisis is a mazelike whirligig of shortsightedness, greed, violent cultural tendencies, and even bad manners, it’s certainly not simply due to a lack of water on the planet. It’s greatly due to politics and mismanagement, and the nightmarish complexities of the problem have edges that seem to grow like a Fibonacci pattern. Virtually all US surface water is contaminated with chemicals like benzene (municipal water systems can’t filter it out), which, any oncologist will tell you, is causally linked to leukemia. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Web pages for Seattle’s watersheds will give you all the grim information you’d ever want about the man-made compounds in local drinking water sources like Puget Sound, the Duwamish, and others.
We take small measures to try to protect ourselves, but these seem weak and miniscule in the face of the larger map of injuries. For example, what good are individual water filters in the big picture? Once the filter is clotted with goodies like Lindane and other pesticide runoff, you toss it into the garbage, which goes into a landfill so the pollutants can be rereleased into the groundwater.
MARK JOHNSON would undoubtedly agree with the futility of that exercise. He’s a Northwest water bottler who, more strongly than most in the water business, is pushing for an end to the profit-first mentality. Cofounder of Trinity Springs in Ketchum, Idaho, Johnson is a kind of water guru, an even-tempered, even-voiced crusader who appears around the country on public TV and radio with ready statistics, bleak facts, and a promise of hope about this culture and its mistakes around the issue of water. In particular, Johnson chafes against megacorporations (like the bottler of Evian water, for example) who buy up wells and aquifers then pump the wells dry so that surrounding local residents’ water dries up, too, and the spring source itself eventually dies.
“It’s unsustainable. They’re pulling water out of a system faster than it can replenish itself naturally; then everyone loses out,” Johnson grouses about his competitors, but he is circumspect, and he refuses to name names. “They could put a smaller pump on a spring and let it flow by itself, but they want it all, and they want it now.” A man of seeming contradictions, Johnson is a former contract engineer with a math degree and a particularly Northwest brand of environmentalism, employing words like “goddess” and “magic” to describe water’s value and properties while also voicing the same blunt, practical message of ecology and reform that WTO protesters voiced last November.
At the very least, he hopes for tougher legislation on industrial dumping and overpumping of underground sources. “It’s critical that we acquire a new attitude, to regard water sources with reverence,” he says huskily, “because water is a gift of life and has mystery to it.” Johnson’s philosophy rings utterly true, albeit oddly, in the shadow of the cool, ironic culture that ensconces us like armor.
The CEO contends that much of his drive to educate and change attitudes about water came from the Trinity springwater itself—and he speaks of the Sawtooth Mountain spring nearly as if it were sentient. About a decade ago, Johnson and business partner Jock Bell purchased the small property that contains one of the spring’s outlets from an elderly woman who, he says, warned the businessmen that there was something “addictive” about the water. Indeed, a sampling alongside other bottled waters proved that Johnson’s Trinity water has a unique taste with smoothness and weight, like the flow of Johnson’s conversation, which seems always to roll toward his environmental goals and crusade. And while it’s true that Johnson has a vested interest in pitching and selling his spring water, his restless activism doesn’t really bespeak self-interest or an eye for financial expansion.
“We humans are water containers, if you will,” he says, “and the more you can remind people how crucial it is that they need not only water but good, pure, vital water, the more that idea starts to sink in. I have faith that people will come to understand that we’ve got to change our ways and manage groundwater, manage our pollution, differently. There are no real enemies of the environment, I don’t think—there’s just ignorance. But even the transnational companies who have unsustainable methods—I think at some point it will occur to them that they’re making hazardous changes to the planet which will affect their children.”
An optimist in a grim arena, Johnson is annoyed that major media portray his company with a measure of dismissal. “The Wall Street Journal always reports pretty derisively about ecologically conscious corporate culture, like ours, or Odwalla’s, for example,” he admits. Like a poet whose works are printed in a manual for operating power tools, Johnson should expect some snarling impatience and backlash to his efforts. Hopefully, he can ride out the storm.
