A lot has been happening this week as we celebrate World Water Day 2011. Over at TakePart.com they featured this exclusive video and interview with Chris Perry, the director of Wall-E about his new animated short "The Incident at Tower 37". The entire video is only about 10 minutes long and presents the story of a community threatened by the loss of their water supply. In the short film a large corporation is taking the water and leaving the community without enough water to support their own livelihood.
Perry is trying to raise awareness of a very real issue that faces many small communities, both human and those found in nature. While his animated vision may seem too sci-fi or distopian for some viewers, the process depicted in his work is taking place all over the world. Bottled water companies take groundwater and package it in single-use plastic containers to be resold at a huge profit for the company. In many cases the water sources that they are harvesting are an essential life line for local communities and ecosystems.
In Perry's short and bittersweet tale the little guys triumph over big business through a guerrilla effort that sabotages the extractor, but in real life we do not have to do anything that drastic. Bottled water companies rely on basic business principles of supply and demand to profit off their industry, and business has been booming for most of the 21st Century. The best way to strike back at bottled water is to STOP BUYING IT! It is time that we stopped letting bottled water be the trendy way to drink up on the go. Switch to a re-usable bottle and fill it from your own home tap. You have the ability to be responsible and take control of your water. It is cheaper and safer for you and the environment, which means that in the end we can all win.
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