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(dāng)流行風(fēng)尚遇上易變的不安

    幾年前由環(huán)保主義者引起的經(jīng)濟(jì)衰退也許正在結(jié)束：瓶裝純凈水流行的終結(jié)。我在過(guò)去的一周中曾兩次去過(guò)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(huì)馬上端來(lái)軟飲料或碳酸飲料。然而現(xiàn)在服務(wù)生則僅僅會(huì)說(shuō)："白水可以嗎？"當(dāng)一些像飯店這樣的低利潤(rùn)商家開(kāi)始轉(zhuǎn)嫁多利潤(rùn)中心時(shí)--在這種情況下，有機(jī)會(huì)調(diào)高低端商品的價(jià)格--你就會(huì)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(jiàn)的最佳方式。

    瓶裝純凈水作為健康生活的象征在美國(guó)曾有穩(wěn)固的地位。在十九世紀(jì)八十年代興起了一種穿可以攜帶用來(lái)裝山泉水的瓶子的結(jié)實(shí)耐用的運(yùn)動(dòng)衣風(fēng)潮。喝天然水那時(shí)象征了"內(nèi)在的健康"--這是一個(gè)廣告語(yǔ)，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(méi)有有氧運(yùn)動(dòng)者的榜樣宣傳，礦泉水的普及也得到了推進(jìn)。回顧九十年代中期，當(dāng)時(shí)風(fēng)潮正起，有人出現(xiàn)了一種持續(xù)的同時(shí)很嚴(yán)重的恐自來(lái)水癥。也許沒(méi)有人比環(huán)境保護(hù)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(jìn)組織曾報(bào)道說(shuō)在美國(guó)喝自來(lái)水有發(fā)生劇烈嘔吐的致命的危險(xiǎn)。1995年，調(diào)查研究顯示1000名美國(guó)人死于喝了受污染的城市水，另有400000人由于飲用自來(lái)水生病。1997年，近245個(gè)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(zhì)。2001年，查出加州的居民用水中含有石油雜質(zhì)。2002年，有關(guān)團(tuán)體就抗議說(shuō)用氯來(lái)凈化自來(lái)水將會(huì)導(dǎo)致"對(duì)孕婦生命健康的極大威脅".

    面對(duì)這樣恐怖的事實(shí)，消費(fèi)者們也許就會(huì)不介意飲用瓶裝純凈水了。畢竟他們還能通過(guò)什么方式來(lái)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(shí)尚的健康理念的象征。但是流行會(huì)變的：現(xiàn)在，瓶裝純凈水已經(jīng)是過(guò)時(shí)的環(huán)保等效物了。因而環(huán)境保護(hù)組織上個(gè)月在Capitol Hill組織了一場(chǎng)全面的有計(jì)劃的反對(duì)運(yùn)動(dòng)。它的標(biāo)語(yǔ)是，嘿，如果你用過(guò)濾器來(lái)凈化自來(lái)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(fèi)在運(yùn)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(rèn)為是保護(hù)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(tuán)，從而掩埋的時(shí)候只占一點(diǎn)小地方�，F(xiàn)在，它們?cè)谒�有方面都被認(rèn)為是有害的，它們阻礙了植物的生長(zhǎng)，其含有的致癌物質(zhì)毒害了我們體內(nèi)的珍貴的循環(huán)機(jī)制（這一觀點(diǎn)權(quán)威學(xué)術(shù)雜志所公布）.

    反對(duì)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(yǔ)自一位瑞士小型時(shí)尚金屬制品壺制作商。有關(guān)瓶子的公益廣告隨處可見(jiàn)，就像，"做愛(ài)，不填埋（?）""遠(yuǎn)離塑料"以及"綠色是新的黑色"或者這個(gè)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(lái)就是，朋友不要用他們喝的水來(lái)威脅朋友）

    因此無(wú)辜的消費(fèi)者們?cè)�被極力鼓吹而覺(jué)得不錯(cuò)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(guò)不去。瓶裝水的一部分吸引力就是，你不需要把費(fèi)勁地去填滿器具柜。這在當(dāng)時(shí)的宣傳中是隨處可見(jiàn)的，購(gòu)買還是同自動(dòng)販賣機(jī)爭(zhēng)論。它可以作為就像是關(guān)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(fèi)者的健康選擇機(jī)制。

    使水隨處可見(jiàn)并不是很久以前的一場(chǎng)運(yùn)動(dòng)。在2005年美國(guó)飲料協(xié)會(huì)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(huì)，針對(duì)前總統(tǒng)關(guān)注的重要事項(xiàng)，勸說(shuō)可口可樂(lè)和百事重新設(shè)計(jì)校園販賣機(jī)上它們產(chǎn)品的標(biāo)示，為了孩子，用純凈的、健康的水和果汁來(lái)代替有害的蘇打。然而現(xiàn)在的學(xué)校，像圣路易斯的華盛頓大學(xué)已經(jīng)推出了"禁止瓶子"的校園號(hào)召。因此，從一個(gè)運(yùn)動(dòng)到另一個(gè)運(yùn)動(dòng)，伴隨著過(guò)去危機(jī)的解決與現(xiàn)在新事物的產(chǎn)生。