The celebrated new environmental scare-umentary, FLOW: For Love of Water, won’t come to a theater near me until next month, so I’ve only seen the preview and the video produced by Nestle Waters (evidently the villain in this telling of the story) in their own defense. Noah Hall, one of the experts featured in Nestle’s retort, offers a good critique of the movie on his blog, and summarizes:
What disappointments me most about the movie FLOW is that it feeds the ideological opposition to water bottling and water privatization at the expense of focusing attention on the real threats to our water. For example, as just reported by John Flesher of the Associated Press (see Chicago Tribune story), some environmental activists in Michigan are considering a ballot initiative to affirm public ownership of water and restrict water bottling, using the release of the movie to build attention for the cause. But this response does nothing to solve the problems of unsafe drinking water and chemical pollution of our lakes and rivers highlighted in the movie.
The perceived bottled water menace has been a topic here more than once before. There’s been valuable push-back in the bottled-water-brouhaha on other fronts lately, as well. [Side note: I’m looking for an explanation of the incongruous inclusion of a quote from T. Boone Pickens at the end of the preview, in which he tells the camera, “People say, ‘Water’s a lot like air, you shouldn’t charge for water.’ Well, OK, watch what happens.” All I can figure is that the man has some uncanny influence in person that makes normally-critical interviewers go gaga. Thankfully, that influence did not extend to the polls in California, where the Pickens-backed Proposition 10 was resoundingly rejected two weeks ago.]