The recession may be finishing what environmentalists started a few years ago: the end of the bottled-water fad. Twice in the past week I have been in restaurants that just a year ago would have been pushing still or sparkling water at their patrons from the moment they sat down. This time the waiters said merely: "Tap water OK?" When low-margin businesses like restaurants start passing on juicy profit centers-in this case, the chance to charge premium prices for a cheap commodity-you know something dramatic has happened. The rise and fall of bottled water may be the best case study yet in the strange politics of trendy environmental causes.

    Bottled water got its foothold in the U.S. as a statement about healthy living. The 1980s craze for sweating at the gym launched a durable fad for toting around bottles of mountain spring water. To drink something so natural was to be "Fit on the Inside"-in the words of an ad campaign that nicely captured the soul-craft of the treadmill set.

    But even without the example set by aerobicizers, the popularity of bottled water had a push. Go back to the mid-'90s, when the trend was booming, and one finds a steady drip-drip of frightful tap-scares. Perhaps no one did more to promote the bottled water craze than the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based activist organization that issued report after breathless report about the lethal dangers spewing from American taps. There were the 1995 studies alleging that 1,000 Americans a year were dying from tainted municipal water, with an extra 400,000 sickened by faucet-flowing pathogens. In 1997 came the alarm that some 245 Midwest towns were serving up a toxic cocktail of HO and weed killer. In 2001 it was rocket fuel in California aquifers. In 2002 the group warned that the chlorine used to disinfect tap water led to "a health risk for pregnant women."

    Faced with this drumbeat of doom, consumers might be forgiven for having taken to the bottle. How else were they to quaff the 64 ounces of water a day they had been told was essential to health? For a little while, carrying a bottle of water was the very symbol of fashionable health-consciousness. But fashions change: Now bottled water is the eco-equivalent of last year's frock. And so none other than the Environmental Working Group was on Capitol Hill last month mounting a full-throated campaign against the stuff. The thrust was that, hey, if you run tap water through a filter, it isn't really so bad after all-and quite the bargain too!

    Environmentalists complain of all the energy wasted shipping and trucking bottled water around, but their most ardent scorn is reserved for the bottles themselves. Once upon a time plastic bottles made from lightweight polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, were an innovation meant to be relatively friendly to the planet. They could be stomped into thin discs, crushed by hand or even rolled up like toothpaste tubes, thus taking up a small space in landfills. Now they are seen as bad in every way, choking the rising oceans and poisoning our precious bodily fluids with leaching carcinogens （an idea promulgated by such august academic journals as the Proceedings of the Society of Anonymous Chain Emails）.

    The trendy disdain for plastic bottles has produced a new fad for reusable containers. Helping to shame the sinners is Sigg, a Swiss manufacturer of stylish little metal jugs. The bottles are available with eco-slogans such as "Make Love Not Landfill," "Rise Above Plastic" and "Green Is the New Black." Or how's this for pushy: "Friends don't let friends drink from plastic." （In my book, friends don't bully friends over the water they drink.）

    And so an innocent choice consumers were urged to feel good about comes to be fraught with moral peril. Part of the appeal of bottled water, after all, was that you didn't have to plan ahead by filling a canteen. It was available at a moment's notice, purchased at a bodega or wrangled from a vending machine. It could stand as a healthy alternative to soda, packaged attractively enough to lure consumers who would otherwise be seduced by caramel-colored fructose bombs.

    It wasn't that long ago that making water available everywhere was itself a sort of crusade. In 2005 the American Beverage Association urged its members to stop selling sugary drinks in schools. A year later the Clinton Foundation, acting on the former president's preoccupation with weighty issues, persuaded Coke and Pepsi to phase out their signature products from campus vending machines, replacing the siren-song of soda with pure, healthful water and juice for kids. But now schools such as Washington University in St. Louis have made "Ban the Bottle" a campus cry. Thus does one crusade lead to another, with the solution to yesterday's crisis providing the stuff of today's.

    當流行風尚遇上易變的不安

    幾年前由環(huán)保主義者引起的經(jīng)濟衰退也許正在結束：瓶裝純凈水流行的終結。我在過去的一周中曾兩次去過一些飯店，就在一年以前只要是飯店的老主顧剛一入座他們就會馬上端來軟飲料或碳酸飲料。然而現(xiàn)在服務生則僅僅會說："白水可以嗎？"當一些像飯店這樣的低利潤商家開始轉嫁多利潤中心時--在這種情況下，有機會調(diào)高低端商品的價格--你就會知道一些戲劇性的事情發(fā)生了。瓶裝水的多少也許是研究現(xiàn)代環(huán)保主義者的政見的最佳方式。

    瓶裝純凈水作為健康生活的象征在美國曾有穩(wěn)固的地位。在十九世紀八十年代興起了一種穿可以攜帶用來裝山泉水的瓶子的結實耐用的運動衣風潮。喝天然水那時象征了"內(nèi)在的健康"--這是一個廣告語，它曾成功地俘獲了每天從事單調(diào)繁重工作的人們的心。

    然而就算沒有有氧運動者的榜樣宣傳，礦泉水的普及也得到了推進�；仡櫨攀�年代中期，當時風潮正起，有人出現(xiàn)了一種持續(xù)的同時很嚴重的恐自來水癥。也許沒有人比環(huán)境保護主義組織為宣傳瓶裝純凈水做的工作再多了，一家華盛頓的積進組織曾報道說在美國喝自來水有發(fā)生劇烈嘔吐的致命的危險。1995年，調(diào)查研究顯示1000名美國人死于喝了受污染的城市水，另有400000人由于飲用自來水生病。1997年，近245個中西部城市中的雞尾酒含有類似于HO和除草劑的有毒物質。2001年，查出加州的居民用水中含有石油雜質。2002年，有關團體就抗議說用氯來凈化自來水將會導致"對孕婦生命健康的極大威脅".

    面對這樣恐怖的事實，消費者們也許就會不介意飲用瓶裝純凈水了。畢竟他們還能通過什么方式來一天暢飲64盎司的健康必需品--水呢？有那么一陣，帶一瓶礦泉水是時尚的健康理念的象征。但是流行會變的：現(xiàn)在，瓶裝純凈水已經(jīng)是過時的環(huán)保等效物了。因而環(huán)境保護組織上個月在Capitol Hill組織了一場全面的有計劃的反對運動。它的標語是，嘿，如果你用過濾器來凈化自來水的話，真的不是那么糟，而且它還很合算！

    環(huán)保者抱怨太多能源浪費在運輸瓶裝水上，但是他們最嗤之以鼻的是瓶子材料本身。很久以前用聚乙烯做成的塑料瓶被認為是保護地球的重大創(chuàng)新。它們可以被踩成扁片兒，或像牙膏管一樣被搓成一團，從而掩埋的時候只占一點小地方�，F(xiàn)在，它們在所有方面都被認為是有害的，它們阻礙了植物的生長，其含有的致癌物質毒害了我們體內(nèi)的珍貴的循環(huán)機制（這一觀點權威學術雜志所公布）.

    反對塑料瓶的熱潮衍生了新的可再利用容器的流行。使罪人丟臉的人是圣人，語自一位瑞士小型時尚金屬制品壺制作商。有關瓶子的公益廣告隨處可見，就像，"做愛，不填埋（?）""遠離塑料"以及"綠色是新的黑色"或者這個新鮮的廣告怎么樣："朋友 不要讓你的朋友用塑料制品喝水。"（在我看來就是，朋友不要用他們喝的水來威脅朋友）

    因此無辜的消費者們曾被極力鼓吹而覺得不錯的選擇正在演變成一種憂慮，這本身就是在精神上的和自己過不去。瓶裝水的一部分吸引力就是，你不需要把費勁地去填滿器具柜。這在當時的宣傳中是隨處可見的，購買還是同自動販賣機爭論。它可以作為就像是關于蘇打水，被包裝的足夠吸引那些有可能被焦糖顏色的瓶子吸引的消費者的健康選擇機制。

    使水隨處可見并不是很久以前的一場運動。在2005年美國飲料協(xié)會就提倡它的成員們停止在校園販賣含糖飲料。一年之后克林頓基金會，針對前總統(tǒng)關注的重要事項，勸說可口可樂和百事重新設計校園販賣機上它們產(chǎn)品的標示，為了孩子，用純凈的、健康的水和果汁來代替有害的蘇打。然而現(xiàn)在的學校，像圣路易斯的華盛頓大學已經(jīng)推出了"禁止瓶子"的校園號召。因此，從一個運動到另一個運動，伴隨著過去危機的解決與現(xiàn)在新事物的產(chǎn)生。