Honest Water

Is there an optimal strategy for water consumption?  My family lives at the base of a volcano next to a river.  Upriver is a series of rice fields, a vinyard, a cherry farm, several peach farms, an apple farm, a Buddhist cave temple, and then nothing but nature all the way to Moniwa Dam. 

By the time it gets to our house, the river is brown and full of garbage: PET bottles, plastic bags, and empty washing machines.  My Father-in-law's eyes water when he tells me how he used to swim in that river, how it was clear and full of fish when he was growing up after the war.

The water in our house comes from a well tapped into the aquifer directly below us.  The garden hose often spits out blades of rice grass.  Mt. Azuma began erupting again two years ago, so the water sometimes smells like sulfur.  Until recently, we had a state-of-the-art water filter hooked up to the kitchen sink, but it broke, so now there is nothing.  We must boil water for my infant's milk, but I'm still worried about chemicals leaking into the aquifer from all the nearby farms.  Japan has had an unfortunate history of pollution-related diseases.  One that persists to this day is an incredibly high rate of stomach cancer due to the water supply having been contaminated with the pylori bacterium, although news reports seem to suggest this is no longer a problem.  However, an even more invidious medical problem associated with drinking unfiltered tap water is contamination with heavy metals which make you go quietly insane.  It would seem that drinking straight from the tap carries some unnecessary risks.

But drinking bottled water is both bad for the environment and associated with higher rates of cancer.  So we are forced to choose between dementia caused by unfiltered tap water and cancer caused by bottled water.  Which do you prefer?  I'm reminded of this quote from Patrick Deneen's "Incoherence" on the recent Gulf oil spill which we all seem to have so quickly forgotten:

What’s remarkable about the images of the oil spewing from the severed pipe a mile deep in the Gulf is the widespread belief that this leakage represents an environmental catastrophe, in contrast to the norm, when we control our circumstances by pumping the substance through pipes to containers to refineries to gas stations to automobiles to exhaust pipes to the atmosphere (or, to fertilizer factories to farm machinery to topsoil to erosion to rivers and back to the Gulf). The only real difference at the moment is the concentrated visibility of the disaster, one that makes visible what is usually hidden – that our civilization exists by poisoning our world, by a concerted and organized effort to release toxic substances from confines where they are relatively sequestered for life to flourish, to a condition where we must come to mistrust the food that we eat, the air that we breath, the water that we drink. Rather than dispersed throughout the world – including the very molecular composition of our bodies– the spew allows us to see with unusual clarity the nature of our civilization. Yet we treat it as an exception, a momentary and controllable lapse, the fault of nefarious oil profiteers, rather than the rule, our “way of life".

Speaking without cynicism, I choose cancer.  By the time I make it to old age, in all likelihood, life expectancy will be 92 or 93 years old - mostly because we will have made great strides in fighting the number one and two killers of humans: heart disease and cancer.  Heavy metals poisoning will likely remain both difficult to detect and difficult to treat.

At my house now, there is iced coffee, iced oolong tea, whole milk, grape juice, and shouchuu, which is Japanese potato liquor.  None of these really quenches thirst without additional consequences, and the temperature has been hovering around 100 degrees all summer.  I'm incredibly thirsty.  Today I went out and bought a two-liter bottle of natural mineral water for 128 yen, which has been sitting next to me and quietly being imbibed as I write this article.  I'm almost finished, and I have to go pee, which is a consequence of my water consumption that - believe it or not - I did not anticipate.    

Comments

[theotherjimmyolson]

Not a good range of choices, and I have no useful suggestions for you, However I'm told that if you breath in a little nitrous oxide while drinking water, you won't care about the consequences.