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drinking water
Trump Is Playing War Crime Roulette With the Livability of the Persian Gulf
If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water due to US attacks, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days.
Jun 11, 2026
In the midst of this week’s round of strikes and counterstrikes between the Trump administration and Iran, Iran’s IRIB News reported that on Tuesday the US had struck a reservoir and a water tank serving the inland town of Kuhestak as well as the port of Sirik on the Persian Gulf Coast.
Sirik is a small town of a few thousand inhabitants that serves as the capital for Sirik district of Hormozgan Province. It is not far from Bandar Abbas, the capital of the province. There is allegedly a base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps at Sirik, which is likely why the town was targeted. (H/t to BBC Monitoring for some of these Iran media links.)
If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113°F (45°C) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women, and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.
Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.
Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move.
The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in 12 hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.
During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.
Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.
Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.
Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.
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How Do We Manage a World in Water Bankruptcy?
According to the UN, the world has moved beyond water crisis into systemic, chronic scarcity threatening public health, economies, and ecosystems while making global cooperation increasingly existential.
Jan 22, 2026
According to a major new report from the United Nations University, global water systems are no longer in crisis, but have entered a state of chronic failure, with shortages that extend far beyond temporary shocks or short-term recovery.
Released on January 20 by the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era concludes that the planet has entered the era of global water bankruptcy. This indicates that long-term water use now exceeds renewable inflows, leaving much of Earth’s natural systems damaged beyond realistic repair. In other words, societies have already exhausted or polluted the natural buffers—rivers, aquifers, wetlands, and glaciers—that once sustained them. Droughts, shortages, and pollution events are increasingly becoming persistent features of daily life. In this post-crisis condition, the authors argue, it is best not to describe the situation as a crisis at all, but as water bankruptcy.
At the press conference set to release the report, Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the UNU-INWEH, emphasized that this is not a semantic shift, but a clear warning that the dominant way governments, markets, and international institutions think about water is no longer fit for reality.
“For decades, scientists, the media, and policymakers have warned about a global water crisis… what we document in this report is a different reality emerging in many places: a persistent failure state in which water systems can no longer realistically return to their historical baselines,” Madani said.
Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits.
The report does not claim that the entire planet is bankrupt. Water bankruptcy is assessed basin by basin and aquifer by aquifer. However, as regions across the globe simultaneously overdraw water and erode the natural systems that sustain it, the world faces a fundamentally altered risk landscape, with cascading threats to food security, agricultural markets, rural livelihoods, and climate feedbacks.
What distinguishes water bankruptcy from familiar narratives of scarcity is the scale of irreversibility. According to the report, societies have not only overdrawn annual renewable water flows, but have also liquidated long-term savings stored in groundwater, wetlands, glaciers, soils, and river ecosystems.
Over the past five decades, the world has lost approximately 410 million hectares of natural wetlands—almost the land area of the European Union—resulting in the disappearance of vital ecosystem services such as flood control, water purification, and habitat provision, valued at more than US$5 trillion. Groundwater depletion is even more consequential. According to the analysis, around 70% of the world’s major aquifers show long-term declining trends. Excessive pumping has already caused land subsidence across nearly 5% of the global land area, including dense urban zones that are home to close to 2 billion people. In some regions, land is sinking by up to 25 centimeters per year, permanently reducing storage capacity and increasing flood risk. These damages are not easily undone. Compacted aquifers, subsided deltas, dried-up lakes, and extinct species represent long-term, irretrievable losses.
As Kaveh Madani emphasizes, “This is not another warning about a future we might still avoid everywhere… It is a diagnosis of a world where, in many basins, the old normal is already gone.”
The current human cost and future risks of water bankruptcy are also staggering. According to the report, nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water insecure or critically water insecure. About 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and roughly 4 billion experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. The risks are compounded given more than half of global food output is located in regions where total water storage (including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater) is already declining or unstable.
The report’s crux is that the global water agenda remains stuck in a crisis-response mindset that is no longer fit for purpose. Such alarming figures are partly the result of governments, utilities, and basin authorities continuing to treat chronic overshoot as a temporary emergency. Short-term emergency measures, supply expansion, and incremental efficiency gains dominate policy discussions, even as underlying water balances continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, this only deepens ecological damage and entrenches unsustainable water-use practices.
Madani was clear at the press conference: “Expecting a wicked problem of this scale to have a simple solution is as naïve as the reductionist solutions that helped get us into the current state,” he said.
Instead, the United Nations University calls for a shift to what it terms bankruptcy management, a concept borrowed deliberately from finance. Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits. It also demands protecting remaining aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, lakes, and glaciers, rather than treating these life-sustaining systems as expendable capital to prop up unsustainable growth.
The report itself also highlights the social and political dimensions of water bankruptcy, stressing that it is not solely an environmental issue. The costs of hydrological overshoot fall hardest on those least responsible and least able to adapt: smallholder farmers, Indigenous communities, and the urban poor. The authors caution that demand reduction is not politically feasible if treated as a purely technical exercise, noting that abruptly cutting water access for farmers could trigger unemployment, social unrest, and broader instability. Effective management, they argue, must be paired with political and economic transitions that protect livelihoods, provide compensation and risk support, enable shifts in crops and practices, and help economies decouple jobs and growth from ever-rising water use.
Despite their sober diagnosis, the authors do not end in resignation, arguing that water could—and existentially must—still serve as a unifying axis in an increasingly fragmented world. Given water intersects climate, biodiversity, food systems, public health, land use, and political stability, it remains one of the few domains where coordination is both necessary and unavoidable.
“Investing in water is an investment in delivering on all of those [aforementioned] agendas,” said Madani, at the report’s launch. “And in rebuilding cooperation in a fragmented world.”
Similarly, authors stress the importance of upcoming political milestones: the UN Water Conferences in 2026 and 2028, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade, and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline. They argue these moments offer a rare window to reset the global water agenda to move beyond incremental efficiency gains and emergency responses toward explicit recognition that many river basins and aquifers have already crossed thresholds where historical conditions cannot be restored.
Yet translating this clarity into action faces stark political and institutional realities. The UN system, tasked with leading such a reset, remains mired in member states cutting funding, worsening geopolitical polarization and international conflict, and key bodies—including the Security Council—grossly failing to uphold the UN Charter’s basic human rights mandates. In practice, declarations and frameworks proliferate, deadlines are extended, but meaningful, coordinated action remains slow, uneven, or hollow. Water may be uniquely cross cutting, yet it is not immune to these structural constraints or the apparent erosion of accountability. Crucially, it also requires that primarily Western, early-industrial economies reckon with histories of inequitable use and extraction that have both driven water shortages and contributed to the persistent inequities of scarcity today.
As with other pressing global crises, the consequences of water bankruptcy may unfold faster than governments and institutions can respond, but the authors argue that naming the problem clearly could galvanize civil society and decision-makers into meaningful action before it’s too late.
“Our message is not despair,” Madani concluded. “It’s clarity. The earlier we face the real balance sheet, the more options we still have.”
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Has Sen Schumer Learned Costly Lessons in the Federal Spending Fight?
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials.
Sep 26, 2025
In March, Food & Water Watch joined a chorus of organizations calling on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer to step aside as Democratic minority leader after his disastrous capitulation during the last federal appropriations fight. At the time, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were running rampant, defunding and destroying critical climate, food, and water programs. But instead of fighting to mitigate the harms, Schumer led fellow Senate Democrats in ceding any leverage they had by capitulating to Republicans’ six-month spending bill without demanding any concessions or procedural backstops.
Now the opportunity has returned to leverage the significant power Senate Democrats have ahead of the latest spending deadline. For the moment it seems that Schumer has learned some lessons from the earlier debacle. He led his caucus to reject a House spending proposal and support an alternative plan to protect critical food, water, and health programs from Trump’s dangerous cuts. He must continue to demonstrate this leadership as the September 30 spending deadline draws near.
Trump and congressional Republicans are playing a dangerous game of chicken, running headfirst into a government shutdown on October 1 with no off-ramp. Trump has refused to even meet with Democratic leadership, and House Republicans are refusing to come back to work until after the funding deadline. They are following the same playbook they used in March to force the hands of Schumer and Senate Democrats. It worked then, and it will work again if Schumer doesn’t stand strong.
After all, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Access to safe, affordable food, clean water, basic healthcare, and so much more.
A Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Though congressional Republicans tout their spending bill as a “clean” extension of current funding levels, this commitment is belied by their threatened use of partisan rescissions to enact Trump’s dangerous cuts later on. This backdoor process fast-tracks the elimination of previously agreed upon funding. While the spending bill needs the support of Senate Democrats to reach the 60-vote threshold to avoid the filibuster, with partisan rescissions Trump can later send Congress a list of programs to eliminate through a simple majority vote—without requiring any Democratic support.
Case in point: Congressional Republicans slashed funding for public television and radio—long an aim of the right—through this partisan rescission process earlier in the year. Trump has further abused this tool to illegally withhold funding through a so-called “pocket rescission,” issuing a last-minute request to freeze funds, run out the clock on the fiscal year, and unilaterally cut congressionally-approved funds. This is unconstitutional.
Further backdoor cuts threaten everything from the environment to education to healthcare. On clean water specifically, Trump and congressional Republicans have proposed slashing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which sets limits on contaminants in water, develops methods to test for and removes toxic substances, and establishes regulations that prevent water pollution in the first place. Slashing the EPA will imperil the ability of regulators to enforce clean water standards, making our water less safe and Americans more sick.
Republicans have also proposed slashing funding for water infrastructure. In fact, Trump’s spending proposal calls for virtually eliminating funding for the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds—the primary source of federal funding for water infrastructure in the country. Our water infrastructure is already dramatically underfunded. Federal cuts will make it even more difficult for municipalities to respond to acute threats to water safety, including toxic PFAS “forever chemicals,” lead, and climate change-induced storms and flooding. The result will be higher water bills for households and business, and dirtier, dangerous water.
Senate Democrats must reject the House spending bill for these and many other reasons. Fortunately, a Democratic counter proposal from Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) includes a key protection against partisan rescissions. We are encouraged that Schumer claims to support this plan.
Recently we facilitated a letter from more than 200 groups across the country that was sent to Sen. Schumer, demanding just this. The letter was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Oxfam America, Popular Democracy, and Public Citizen, among many others. It seems that Sen. Schumer is finally listening.
With very few opportunities for the minority party to make a difference, Schumer and Senate Democrats now must hold strong to stand up for everyday Americans and their access to the most basic essentials, including clean water. No budget deal that allows for future partisan rescissions can be allowed to pass.
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Rain Barrels at the End of the World
I can’t keep Donald Trump from building up ICE as a paramilitary goon squad or stop the polar ice caps from melting, but I can do my best not to use too much water.
Sep 24, 2025
The truck wheel’s inner tube was right in front of me, no longer half-submerged in the pond’s late summer muck. After so many hot weeks without rain, the water had dried up and the garbage was completely exposed.
My feet barely sank into the mud as I pulled the inner tube free. It was heavier than I expected, full of leftover pond water. I tipped it to drain the water, so I could carry it away. But that water just kept dribbling out.
It was dark and smelled of rotten leaves. As I shook the tube, I tried to keep the muck from getting on my shoes. There must have been 3 or 4 gallons of it. Contorted in an uncomfortable crouch and harassed by bugs as the water glugged slowly out of the little hole, I felt impatient. I was ready to share my grubby prize with my friends, but the hole was so small and I was still far from the road. So, I waited, watching the water continue to trickle out.
But I couldn’t just wait. Instead, my mind drifted to catastrophe, and I began imagining a near future where I could no longer take water for granted. Such a thought was in my head not just because I’m prone to binge on dystopian novels but because I read the newspaper and watch the TV news at night. So, there I was, crouching at the no-longer-pond’s edge, cradling that huge inner tube, and wondering how long it would be in our overheating future before the dark, fetid water I was pouring onto the ground would seem like a precious resource for my family and me. Extended drought? The collapse of our water infrastructure? War? None of those nightmare scenarios is remote enough anymore that I can simply dismiss them as figments of my overactive imagination.
There is no longer any human right to water in Gaza or parts of the West Bank either.
Meanwhile, I continued to think about that gross water. How would I clean it if I needed to? I recalled my survival-skills training between 8th and 9th grade and decided I would first have to filter it, then boil it, and finally treat it with iodine. And no, it wouldn’t be delicious or refreshing, but it probably wouldn’t kill us either. Then I thought about how it might have been inside that inner tube for years and realized that life would have to be brutish indeed before I considered such a last resort water source.
Is our water infrastructure here in New London, Connecticut, old? It sure is. Sometimes there are even black flecks in the water that pours out of our faucets. But no worries now. After all, I had a big bottle of fleckless water in my backpack, and I certainly wouldn’t need to drink that ancient inner-tube pond water. Not today, anyway.
Better yet, rain was forecast for later in the weekend! And so, the moment passed—but not completely because I suddenly remembered some water I drank 30 years ago that had been boiled over a wood fire in a small town in Guatemala when I was part of a peace delegation there. All these years later, my tongue could still feel the eerie dryness, the woodiness of that water, and suddenly I wondered whether that feeling would be in my future, too.
Water Wars—For Real
The kids in New London had gathered in this park just a few weeks earlier for “Water Wars,” a beloved community institution where, on a hot summer morning, kids and grown-ups arm themselves with water guns and soak one another. That day, there was also a dunk tank, a deejay, and dozens of people running around with big, brightly colored Super Soakers.
In truth, I’ve never liked the event, perhaps because I’m a grumpy old person who just doesn’t care for guns of any sort, even play ones. And now, contemplating the future loss of water and the violence that could come with it, those Water Wars suddenly seemed like fin de siècle madness to me. As I—excuse the image—immerse myself ever more deeply in the current and impending water crises, I find myself increasingly troubled by the very real water wars to come.
The Pacific Institute, which has tracked water-related conflicts for three decades, never counted more of them than the 347 in 2023 (the last year for which it had complete data). Its report distinguished between water as a trigger for war, a weapon of war, and a casualty of war. In Burkina Faso, Mexico, Ukraine, and elsewhere globally, civilians now all too often find themselves going without water, as its sources and treatment facilities are destroyed, while groups fight over who controls what water remains.
Dr. Peter Gleick, cofounder of the Pacific Institute, wrote The Third Age of Water in which he argues that everyone deserves the “human right to water.” And at this moment, nowhere on Earth is water more a cause for and casualty of war than in Palestine. As he notes, that is “partly a reflection on the scarcity of water in the region. It’s partly a reflection on disputes over control of land in the West Bank. And it’s partly a reflection of the massive destruction of Gaza after the Hamas attack in October, where infrastructure of all kinds has been targeted—civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, water systems, energy systems. It’s a reflection of the broad violence in the region.” In short, there is no longer any human right to water in Gaza or parts of the West Bank either.
And believe it or not, even as such realities came to my mind, the water was still dribbling out of that inner tube, while my arms hurt ever more from holding it up. Still, when I placed my minuscule discomfort alongside that of all those people in Gaza, waiting in vain for both water and food in a manmade famine of genocidal proportions, I felt ashamed.
All Wars Are Resource Wars
Even before the complete leveling of all infrastructure there in an almost two-year massive bombardment, the lives of Palestinians were violently controlled and curtailed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). An IDF Military Order had long forbidden Palestinians from building any new water installations without a permit from the Israeli army. Since that order was issued in 1967, almost no one has gotten such a permit. So, Palestinians weren’t able to drill new water wells, install pumps, or even deepen existing wells. And now, many of them don’t have access to fresh water springs at all and are cut off from the Jordan River.
In a Big Brother twist that boggles the mind, they aren’t even allowed to collect rainwater in cisterns. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in his book The Message, “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.” And if anyone is still on the fence about that one-sided war of dominion, such a piece of information should knock you to the side of the suffering, starving, thirsty, dying Palestinians.
Of course, on some level, all wars are resource wars. Military scholar Michael Klare made exactly that point as early as 2001. For nearly two years, Israel has used Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023 attack on civilian and military targets as its excuse to destroy as much of Gaza as possible—mission (almost) complete. US President Donald Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” fever dream of Gaza as a casino-state built to Atlantic City levels of gaudiness might never be realized, but Israel’s long game certainly includes complete control over Palestinian natural resources, including oil and gas. Americans are propagandized to think of the “poor Palestinians” (if we think of them at all), even though Palestine is rich in natural resources.
Trump Doesn’t Drink Water
The rumor is that Donald Trump drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day (the best argument against “Just for the Taste of It” I’ve ever heard). His aversion to drinking water is well known; and his antipathy toward the basic building blocks of life seems to come right out of a Mad Max movie, but it’s consistent with his administration’s assault on the water system infrastructure in the United States.
The 2024 Report Card of the American Society of Civil Engineers gives our water infrastructure a C-. Worse yet, they project a $309 billion chasm in funding between the drinking-water-infrastructure needs of this country and what the federal government is allocating in investments. And that chasm is expected to grow into a gulf of $620 billion by 2043. In short, we’re losing the equivalent of 50 million Olympic-sized swimming pools of water through leaks and cracks every year, more than enough to meet the needs of the 2.2 million Americans who don’t have running water or basic indoor plumbing, according to Dig Deep, a water access organization. That’s one hell of a lot of people in the richest nation on Earth, even if not that many in a population of 340 million.
While you might imagine that it’s just back-to-the-landers and old white hippies who like to chop wood and haul water, more than 44 million of us are served by inadequate water systems that recently had Safe Drinking Water Act violations—one of every seven Americans. My black-flecked water might be among that number.
President Trump, of course, is hardly bending over backwards to address such a gulf in water access. For him, undoubtedly, the problem doesn’t even register, not like railing against apocalyptic city hellscapes, deputizing brutes to muscle immigrants out of the country, or selectively mourning some victims of gun violence and not others.
Rain Barrel Resistance
I collect rainwater in three big olive barrels with spigots drilled into the bottom and mesh stretched over the top to try to keep mosquitoes from setting up residence there. Earlier this year, I even bought a dozen goldfish after the Internet assured me they would eat mosquito larvae. I freed them into those barrels and encouraged my kids to name them. Within a week, unfortunately, they turned up dead at the top of the barrels.
I use the water to keep my weedy garden alive and give it to my chickens (assumedly with tasty mosquito larvae for extra protein). I got the rain barrels after reading that unchlorinated, untreated rainwater is better for plants. In light of everything, can I now see those barrels as an act of resistance on this distinctly overheating planet of ours? How long before someone tries to regulate rainwater collection? How long before the tech bros figure out a way to put a price tag on what falls from the sky? (That’s anything but far-fetched if you consider how everything else is being privatized.)
How long can I depend on the relatively clean water from my tap? It flows in a big underground pipe from a reservoir less than 10 miles from my home and is filtered by my local water company. That system has provided New London, a town established in the 1600s, with water for a good long time, but will it keep doing so for the foreseeable, ever hotter future? In fact, is there a foreseeable future?
Which will get us first? Forest fires or fascism? Misogyny or microplastics? Global warming or the paramilitary-ICE take over?
Sometimes, I pay my water bill in person. I asked once if there was anything I could do to be more efficient and steward my water resources better. The woman behind the counter looked at my bill and then said, “For a single person, you’re doing pretty good.”
“Oh,” I replied, “I’m actually a family of five.” (I wondered then if I looked like a single lady or if she was just basing her statement on my water consumption.)
“What!?” she exclaimed and added, “You are not a very good water customer then. You should get a pool or wash your car more or something!”
I realized that she was joking and we laughed together. Then, she commended me on my family’s good water savings.
And it’s true that here in the Northeast, I might still be able to lull myself into complacency. It’s raining, in fact, as I write this. But I can’t act so naively when we’re clearly heading off a weather cliff. A recent headline in my local newspaper still haunts me. “Scientists tap ‘secret’ fresh water under the ocean, raising hopes for a thirsty world.” What could go wrong? After all, there’s evidently a vast freshwater aquifer beneath the ocean floor off the eastern coast of the United States and, amid a massive and growing water crisis, the world needs water. However, Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans offers caution: “If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences.”
Will that aquifer and others like it become the United States’ strategic reserves, alongside oil reserves and the nuclear weapons we keep in “reserve” to protect our wealth? Might countries like ours someday go to war to defend any edge they might have in dwindling water reserves? Trump’s saber-rattling at our neighbor to the north was at least partially water related, wasn’t it? In his usual fantasy-filled fashion, he imagined a “large faucet” directing Canadian water to California’s needy orchards and fields.
Preparing for—Responding to—All the Bads
Which will get us first? Forest fires or fascism? Misogyny or microplastics? Global warming or the paramilitary-ICE take over? Obviously, we’re in an age of polycrisis, of multi-headed, interconnected catastrophes that we need to confront all at once.
Talk about drinking from a fire hose! But at least we have to keep trying.
I suffer from brief spells of wanting to just sink into the leftover muck in the park where I found that old inner tube and let all the change—the good and bad, but mostly the bad—just wash over me.
Instead, I shouldered that still heavy (but by now empty) inner tube, put one small foot in front of another, and hauled it out of the pond bed. As I dragged it along the path, I toggled between despair, hopelessness, and a steadfast grind of resolute, teeth-gritting effort to do good.
I can’t change the gutting of federal institutions or the assault on science. But I can pick up trash in a public park. I can’t end the Israel Defense Forces assault on Gaza, but I do boycott (no SodaStream for me). I have divested (my paltry nest egg) and I still support sanctions.
I can’t keep Donald Trump from building up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a paramilitary goon squad or stop the polar ice caps from melting, but I can smile at my neighbors, network with friends into rapid response whenever ICE shows up, and do my best not to use too much water.
It’s all so small, given everything we face, that it’s almost not worth mentioning. Still, that drying pond bed is at least a little cleaner, my community a little friendlier, and I am at least witnessing (and trying to alleviate) the suffering in Palestine. Shouldn’t that matter at least a little?
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Stop the GOP Budget From Dirtying Your Drinking Water
At risk in the imminent spending battle are billions of dollars essential to keeping our water safe and clean, funding everything from replacing toxic lead pipes to upgrading treatment technology to remove PFAS.
Aug 20, 2025
When US Congress went on summer break for all of August, they left on the table a major piece of legislation that will have profound consequences for the safety of our water: the annual spending, or appropriations, bill.
This legislation funds federal programs, departments, and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the fiscal year, which runs through September 30.
When they return in September, Congress will have less than a month to hammer out a deal to keep the lights on—or many parts of the federal government will shut down on the first of October.
At risk in this imminent spending battle are billions of dollars essential to keeping our water safe and clean, funding everything from replacing toxic lead pipes to upgrading treatment technology to remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Congress members have already made proposals for the spending bill attacking those funds, putting clean water for many in jeopardy.
At the same time, US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are turning to a new sneaky backdoor partisan tactic called rescission to slash funding and go back on their own deals. This is not only a threat to clean water support, but to the funding of any government program. Congress must block any spending bill that leaves the door open for rescissions.
Rescissions: A Sneaky Backdoor Way to Eliminate Support for Clean Water
Under the regular procedure, the House approves a spending bill and sends it to the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to end the filibuster. This generally ensures a more bipartisan process in the Senate. When Congress hasn’t been able to pass regular spending bills, it has passed continuing resolutions to extend current levels of funding. These still require a 60-vote majority in the Senate.
But the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are turning to a special tool to upend this bipartisan system. That tool—rescissions—allows them to slash spending they already agreed to, without any say from Democrats.
At a time when the price of basic necessities continues to grow, we cannot eliminate federal support for safe, affordable water.
With rescissions, Trump can send a list of programs that he wants to cut in a special request to Congress. Crucially, the vote to eliminate those funds requires only a simple majority in the Senate. It is not subject to the filibuster.
These backdoor recissions are the same partisan scheme that Trump and congressional Republicans used to eliminate support for PBS and NPR. Now, some Republicans have signalled that if Congress passes a continuing resolution, they’ll work with Trump to roll back funding in that bill through rescissions.
This threatens funding for everything from safe food to education to housing. Funding for safe drinking water is also at risk—the EPA, the leading federal agency for protecting our water, has already been a major target of the Trump administration. Rescissions’ threat to safe water looms large.
Congressional Republicans Attack Vital Clean Water Funding
In proposals for this year’s spending bill, Trump and congressional Republicans have directly attacked the EPA’s vital work to protect our water. By gutting its funding and attacking its workforce, they’re undermining the main federal agency responsible for safe drinking water. Among its crucial responsibilities, the EPA sets limits on contaminants in water, develops methods to test for and remove toxic substances, and establishes regulations that prevent water pollution in the first place.
Trump and Congress have also proposed slashing hundreds of millions of EPA dollars dedicated to local and state water safety projects. (About half of the EPA’s entire budget goes directly to states through State and Tribal Assistance Grants.)
That includes massive cuts to the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs). The SRFs are the primary source of federal funding for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in the country.
For decades, these funds have provided billions of dollars to build and improve wastewater treatment systems and help communities comply with water safety regulations. Without them, we would have more contaminated, less affordable water.
Here are the main defunding proposals:
- House Republicans want to eliminate $662 million from the SRFs. The House spending bill (H.R.4754) would cut the SRFs by nearly 25%, from $2.8 billion to $2.1 billion. This would be the lowest level since 2008.
- The Senate proposed to eliminate $250 million from the SRFs for replacing toxic lead service lines. The Senate appropriations bill (S.2431) cuts and transfers dedicated funding for lead pipe replacements that had already been appropriated and provided through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. These funds were set to go out the door. This is the last year of funding provided by the infrastructure bill, and communities must get every cent.
- Trump wants to cut 100% of the $2.8 billion in SRF funds.Trump wants to virtually eliminate the SRFs with a nearly 90% cut this year. He’s also announced a goal to outright eliminate this water funding in the future. He could achieve this goal and bypass the traditional bipartisan congressional spending process by sending his cronies in Congress a rescissions proposal with a list of programs to defund and eliminate.
What We’ll Lose If We Lose Clean Water Funding
These proposals strike a dangerous tone for Republican leadership. The State Revolving Funds (SRFs) have traditionally enjoyed broad bipartisan support because they fund basic water safety projects that provide immense public health benefits to communities.
These projects are managed by states, which pass SRF funds to local water and sewer utilities. New York State alone has $9.5 billion-worth of drinking water projects and $6 billion of wastewater and stormwater projects seeking support from its SRFs.
They include:
- Updates to technology at treatment plants to remove PFAS and other toxic contaminants. PFAS are toxic, lab-made “forever chemicals” that pollute the water of more than 165 million people in the United States. PFAS accumulate in the body and are associated with many serious health harms, including cancer and reproductive harm. SRF dollars help remove dangerous PFAS from drinking water. In New York, Nyack Village has requested $4.7 million, and Kent Water District has requested $1 million to that end.
- Replacement of toxic lead service lines. There is no safe level of lead in drinking water, and it’s especially dangerous for children. Yet millions of families in the United States are still exposed to lead in their drinking water every single day. SRF dollars help communities replace lead service lines, which are the main source of lead contamination of drinking water. New York City alone seeks SRF support for $90 million-worth of lead line replacements.
- Repair and upgrade wastewater infrastructure to protect waterways and help keep our waters safe. Aging sewer pipes, broken equipment, outdated treatment plants, and failing systems overwhelmed by climate change-fueled storms can cause raw sewage to spill into our neighborhoods. That sewage pollutes the waters that we rely on for our drinking water, fishing, and swimming. SRF funds help address these problems. In New York, for example, Rockland County Sewer District is seeking funding for more than half a dozen projects to help protect the Hudson River.
Projects like these are not only happening in New York—they’re planned and underway in every single state. And they are all under fire from Trump and Congress.
Slashing Federal Dollars Will Make Water More Expensive
The proposed massive cuts come at a time when the needs of our nation’s water and wastewater systems are growing. The EPA estimates that upgrading our water and wastewater infrastructure will cost $1.3 trillion over the next two decades—just to comply with existing federal law.
Federal funding for water infrastructure, however, has plummeted 77% in real terms since its peak in the late 1970s. Meanwhile, the cost paid by localities has more than tripled after accounting for inflation. Local water utilities pay for these costs by hiking water bills for local businesses and households.
Senate Democrats have an opportunity to defend safe water and stop Republicans’ rescission scheme right now.
SRF cuts would lead to higher water rates for many people who already struggle to pay their bills. Already, as many as 1 in 3 households struggles to afford their water bill.
When households receive unaffordable water bills, they may cut back on medicine, groceries, or other essentials; or they don’t pay for their water service. More people will fall into water debt, lose service to shutoffs, and even lose their homes because of unpaid water bills. At a time when the price of basic necessities continues to grow, we cannot eliminate federal support for safe, affordable water.
Instead of cutting water infrastructure funding, we need to expand it. Beyond this year’s spending battle, Congress must pass the WATER Act (HR 3376, S 1730) to safeguard federal water funding from more reckless spending cuts.
Congress Must Guarantee Support for Safe Water
Senate Democrats have an opportunity to defend safe water and stop Republicans’ rescission scheme right now. This year’s spending bill needs support from seven Senate Democrats to pass. They must leverage this power to pass a bill that (1) fully funds safe water and (2) guarantees that funding by preventing future unilateral rescissions by Trump and congressional Republicans.
Our communities need lasting federal support to help ensure safe, affordable water and sewer service for all. Safe water is nonnegotiable. Our elected leaders must stand up for us and oppose any spending bill that slashes federal support for clean water, and any spending bill that leaves the door open for Trump’s partisan rescissions.
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The Price of Survival in Gaza
We have endured more suffering and psychological pain than mountains could bear.
Aug 08, 2025
Since this war began, I am living a life like Robinson Crusoe's. He faced an existential ordeal on his island, but fought brilliantly for his survival: Here in the ruins of Gaza, I face the same ordeal, and fight with all my might to survive. I may envy Crusoe for the abundance of food he had on his island, but I would not dream of taking his place there, because he certainly would not accept coming to the hell of Gaza.
All types of fuel have been unavailable for almost half a year. I have had no choice in these months other than feeding our house furniture to the fire in order to feed our children. Yet I did not succeed in filling their stomachs or quelling their hunger, because in our house we have lots of mouths and few mouthfuls. Despite all of that I did not give up, but insisted on wrestling with the hunger monster: I planted my nail in his neck, and harnessed all the power I had to budge him away from my children.
I threw almost every flammable thing I had into the mouth of the fire. I burned our bed, sofas, chairs, tables, frames of the doors, and also burned some of our clothes and curtains. What pained me the most was carrying my books to the altar. I burned all the books of my home library: hundreds of valuable books on history, anthropology, philosophy, geography, religion, literature, and memoirs were incinerated.
I felt heavy sadness and bitter nostalgia as I tore each page from each book and gave them to the cooking fire. I had special memories with each one. Sometimes I cried when it came to tearing books stamped with dedications by fellow writers. My tears fell like showers of rain as I tore up books dedicated to me by my closest friend, the apostolic poet Saleem Al-Nafar.
Our horizons have become dark and melancholy, the smell of death has become the air we breathe, and blood has become the dew of our mornings.
Food is rare and more expensive each day. Thus I have wandered for many days and hours to find the black market's vendors, until I become dizzy and fall down in exhaustion from this waste of calories. Finally I get back to our house with a few handfuls of grain, or at best a kilogram of wheat flour. We eat one humble meal per day. My wife and I compete in depriving ourselves of the most food. What we save from our sole meal we give to our children as a second meal, which is often dinner.
When I cook for my family, I don't cook familiar dishes, but invent new ones by mixing anything with anything else, because we have so few ingredients. Our food lacks many nutrients, whether vitamins, minerals, or fats, and perhaps the most deficient thing is protein. My knowledge of wild herbs led me to the purslane plant. Although it was rare this year, I searched for it patiently, and fed it to my children. I believe it replenished their bodies with some minerals and vitamins.
The shelves of Gaza's pharmacies are almost empty: There are no more food supplements such as an iron-rich syrup to treat our children's malnutrition, nor any milk formula to feed our newborn daughter, nor any medications. We cook with an iron skillet because it imparts some iron into the food. If your anemic child gets sick, you will be the real patient, because you will visit lots of pharmacies and come away with empty hands.
We are getting terribly thin. I have stopped sitting on hard surfaces, because my pelvic bones rub against them. I get depressed when I look at my children during their sleeping, because their legs and arms are becoming increasingly skinny. Our clothes are loose on our shrunken bodies. My trousers have started falling down off my body, so I tie them to my waist with a rope.
There is another enemy stalking our family: the vile mosquitoes that creep in through our house windows, which were shattered by bombing. Since my children have severe anemia, it hurts me to see a mosquito bite one of them. So I spend two-thirds of each night making patrols around them. I chase their buzzing enemies, and as I kill a mosquito and see blood spurting out of it, I pray that the source of this blood is not my children's arteries.
Getting water these days is like giving birth from the flank. It is more scarce or wholly unavailable each day, far from our home, and heavy to carry. I walk long distances to get it. It does not quench your thirst, nor is it suitable for household use. It is polluted and salty because it comes only from ancient wells: it clearly damages our teeth, and over time may be harming our kidneys. The scarcity of water is accompanied by a scarcity of hygiene materials, so we can bathe only rarely; therefore, my children's hair is not clean, and a painful rash never clears from their skin.
The fire over which I cook harms my body a lot. It fills my lungs with thick black smoke, paints me with soot, turns my eyes bleary red, and causes me a lot of burns: Just breaking the wood of our belongings cuts my hands. Tears often accompany my sitting by these fires, sometimes due to the smoke and heat, and other times because of pain and sorrow.
It is not just our bodies that have withered and wearied, but also our souls. We have endured more suffering and psychological pain than mountains could bear. Atrocities we experience drive us to the brink of madness. We encounter fear, anxiety, depression, nightmares, and hopelessness. Our horizons have become dark and melancholy, the smell of death has become the air we breathe, and blood has become the dew of our mornings. We have reached a stage where we envy the dead for their death, and wish we could lie beside them in their graves.
We have survived until now by a miracle: perhaps it is our resilience, but I cannot guarantee it to last forever. So we crave salvation as we hunger for our only meager meal every 24 hours. We hope for a salvation like that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was fortunate enough to escape the jaws of Nazis and Vichy France. We need the luck of Strauss.
You can read more about Muhammad, his family, and his experiences over the past five years at jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com and on around 60 podcast programs on Palestinian subjects at the YouTube channel 37Dionysos.
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How Forever Chemicals 'Poisoned the World'
A new book tells the history of how U.S. corporations sold the country on toxic chemicals, while lying about the harm they posed.
Jul 27, 2025
Every child is born pre-polluted—polluted with dangerous, human-made chemicals.
So writes Mariah Blake in the preface to her important book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The United States is the place where she writes that every child is born pre-polluted, but I think merely because she's writing about the United States, not because it isn't also true of everywhere else on Earth. In fact, Blake quotes Rachel Carson as having written in 1962 that every human everywhere is subjected to dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception.
But U.S. corporations—chiefly Dupont and 3M—are the source of the problem. Well, them and the U.S. government or lack thereof. Forever chemicals, like standing armies, carpet bombings, nuclear weapons, income taxes, and so many of the things we hold dear, come from World War II, upon the end of which, as Blake notes, poison gases became pesticides, explosives became fertilizers, and military plastics became consumer goods. It's just possible that the respectable consumerism kicked off in the 1950s was a lot more reckless and damaging than any 1960s counterculture.
The origins of plastics—and of forever chemicals—goes back to research by DuPont prior to and during WWII. And the government's coverup of the dangers was part of the Manhattan Project—as was the public-relations campaign around the benefits of fluoride. The original sites that proximity to which could put cancer-causing forever chemicals into your body were Manhattan Project sites, and the Atomic Energy Commission covered up the dangers at the time, as did corporate profiteers, which have run denial and misinformation campaigns ever since. Before the first no-stick frying pan landed on the first shelf of the first U.S. store, Dupont was strategizing to minimize its financial risk for the harm and suffering expected to result. The tobacco and fossil fuel liars learned from the plastics liars, but were not as good at it.
I applaud Mariah Blake for telling moving, personal stories, and framing them in the broadest context.
Two big players drove the demand for fluorochemicals in the 1960s and 70s, as the dangers became more widely known, Blake writes. One was the U.S. Navy, which worked with 3M to develop PFOA-containing fire-fighting foam that Blake writes would be deployed at military bases across the country. (More accurate would be across the world.) The other was a former DuPont engineer named Bill Gore who had worked on military uses of Teflon but would go on to create Gore-Tex.
Blake's book does a tremendous job shaped around the familiar outline of interspersing particular personal stories with broader history. Her primary focus is on individuals in Hoosick Falls, New York, who become victims and activists, though stories from Parkersburg, West Virginia (perhaps known from the film Dark Waters) and North Bennington, Vermont, and elsewhere are also included. The corporate poisoners in Hoosick include Honeywell, which some readers will be aware is a major weapons maker. These stories are crushingly tragic with far too much detail to be statistics. But the statistics are also in the book. In 2016, over 5 million people in 19 U.S. states and several U.S. territories were informed their drinking water had unsafe levels of chemicals. I can hardly begin to imagine reading each of their stories, stories of death, suffering, birth defects, mothers giving birth in U.S. hospitals—like mothers near U.S. bases in Iraq—expecting birth defects; stories of choices being made between job security and challenging the poisoning of water by corporations that had known what would happen before they did it and had done it anyway.
Also chronicled here is the history of military and corporate control of environmental regulation, if it even merited that name prior to the sprees of deregulation indulged in since the era of the Teflon President Ronald Reagan (may his nickname evolve to mean deadly poisoner rather than impunity). Blake takes the history back to my neighbor enslaver Thomas Jefferson who gave DuPont government contracts for gunpowder long before Dupont's WWI merchandising of death, or (not mentioned in the book) its funding of fascist groups in the U.S., or its investment in both sides of WWII including GM's production of Nazi trucks and IG Farben's production of poison gas for concentration camps. The "regulation" history includes the Dupont-led establishment of the principle that all new chemicals are safe until proven otherwise. This, Blake notes, is why the vast majority of over 80,000 chemicals circulating in the United States (and presumably indifferent to borders) have never been tested for safety by the U.S. government.
Forever chemicals come from ground water, smokestacks, landfills, wastewater treatment plants, sewage sludge spread on farmland, firefighting foam, poisoned fish eaten by humans, and all variety of consumer goods. The particular ones that are subject to countless lawsuits are being replaced by new ones, less known and possibly more dangerous, but legal by virtue of not having been made illegal. They saturate the world before anyone begins studying them. Congress changed the absurd legal practice of approving all new chemicals in 2016, just in time for Trump 1.0 to illegally change it back.
I applaud Mariah Blake for telling moving, personal stories, and framing them in the broadest context. I quibble with a single sentence in the book, the one claiming that the bombing of Nagasaki "ended the war" which is a falsehood marketed by some of the very same people who told the world forever chemicals were good for us.
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A Moral Imperative: Embracing the Precautionary Principle and the Right to Know
When there is a suspected risk of harm—and scientific certainty is not yet established—the burden of proof should not fall on the people who may be harmed by it.
Jul 19, 2025
We live in a time that celebrates innovation—but too often, it’s innovation without accountability. Pesticides are sprayed where children play. Harmful chemicals are embedded in everyday products. Communities are exposed to toxic risks without warning.
The pattern is clear: Dangerous substances are allowed into our lives before their safety is truly understood. Industry profits from speed, while public protections are stuck in delay. The default approach often favors inaction until overwhelming evidence of danger is undeniable. But by then, the damage is already done. From asbestos to lead paint to Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals,” history offers a grim catalog of missed opportunities to prevent harm. Each case is a reminder that early warnings were ignored, risks were downplayed, and the public was left unprotected.
That’s why we must fully embrace the Precautionary Principle and defend the Right to Know as the foundation of public health, environmental justice, and informed consent.
At its core, the Precautionary Principle is straightforward and rooted in common sense: When there is a suspected risk of harm—and scientific certainty is not yet established—the burden of proof should not fall on the people who may be harmed by it. These aren’t bureaucratic ideals—they’re essential safeguards in a world where the cost of delay is measured in illness, inequity, and lost public trust.
It’s not radical to ask what’s in our air, water, or soil. What’s radical is expecting families to live with uncertainty, secrecy, or delayed action.
When I founded California Safe Schools, it was because of one disturbing reality: Parents had no idea when or where pesticides were being used on school campuses. There was no warning, no notice, and no choice. Children and school staff were being exposed—without their knowledge or consent.
Through years of community organizing, scientific research, and policy advocacy, we helped secure a major shift in how public schools approach pesticide use. In 1999, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest in the country—adopted a groundbreaking Integrated Pest Management Policy grounded in the Precautionary Principle and the Right to Know. It required written notification of pesticide use, prioritized least-toxic alternatives, and banned broadcast spraying.
This became a model for statewide reform. In 2000, California passed the Healthy Schools Act, ensuring that all public schools would follow similar transparency and notification requirements. And in 2005, AB 405, sponsored by California Safe Schools, made California the first state in the nation to ban the use of experimental, conditional, or phased-out pesticides on school grounds.
These victories weren’t just legislative—they were lifesaving. They proved what’s possible when grassroots voices, science, and public values come together. They also reaffirmed a fundamental truth: People have a right to know what they’re being exposed to and the right to act on that knowledge.
Still, these principles continue to face resistance. The Right to Know is sometimes viewed with hesitation—treated not as a basic public good, but as a burden or threat. Communities are routinely left in the dark about nearby industrial emissions, pesticide use near schools, or the presence of toxic substances in drinking water. In Flint, Michigan residents were told their water was safe long after it had been poisoned with lead. If we’re serious about protecting public health—especially for the most vulnerable—then transparency and prevention must be the norm, not the exception. It’s not radical to ask what’s in our air, water, or soil. What’s radical is expecting families to live with uncertainty, secrecy, or delayed action.
The Precautionary Principle and the Right to Know are practical tools that remind us that safety should never be an afterthought—and that acting early, openly, and ethically is not just the right thing to do; it’s essential.
We don’t need to wait for more evidence to take meaningful steps forward. What we need is the collective courage to revisit outdated systems, to consistently put human well-being first, and to ensure that those most vulnerable are fully protected.
The good news is that each of us can play a role in advancing this work. Real change begins with awareness—and is sustained through action. Learn what chemicals are being used in your schools, parks, and neighborhoods. Ask questions. Show up to school board meetings and local government hearings. Speak out for policies that reflect transparency, precaution, and the use of least-toxic alternatives. Organize with neighbors. Support legislation that puts health before profit. And perhaps most importantly, share what you learn—because awareness leads to advocacy, and advocacy leads to change.
Every voice counts. Every action matters. Together, we can protect the places where our families live, learn, and grow—and build a future that prioritizes health, safety, and transparency.
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The Poison We Pay For: As Federal Budget Cuts Slash Public Water, Big Plastic Wins
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis.
Jun 27, 2025
As the Trump administration works to finalize next year’s budget, we must pay attention to funds for drinking water. The currently proposed federal funding cuts will weaken the ability of public water systems to ensure safe water, diminish trust in tap water, and increase business for plastic bottled water—the de facto response when water systems falter.
But what could be more important than access to clean water? To some industries, it seems the answer is profit—especially for Big Plastic.
Water is essential for all life, and access to safe drinking water is an internationally recognized human right. To deny water is to deny health.
It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
President Donald Trump says his administration wants “really clean water.” However, it’s difficult to see how dismantling Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation and capacity, rolling back federal clean water protections, and drastically cutting drinking water infrastructure will lead to anything but the pollution of billions of single-use plastic bottles, increased threats to public health, and worsening water injustice.
The White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget plans to slash funding for the Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds by nearly 90%. This funding is the primary source of federal support for water infrastructure across the nation, and has been underfunded for decades. In fact, these new proposed cuts layer onto a near 80% decline in investment in public water systems between 1977 and 2017, which has left many Americans exposed to aging and insufficient infrastructure, and at times, unsafe water. It also doesn’t make good economic sense: Estimates show the proposed cuts will result in the loss of 38,622 American jobs and $6.47 billion in economic output.
Enter: Big Plastic
In the United States, federal cuts will leave state and local governments trying to pick up the tab. Water systems have already raised water rates to cover existing funding gaps, causing a deepening water affordability crisis, only made worse by increasing water privatization. High water rates result in mounting household water debts and shut offs—a practice United Nations experts consider a violation of human rights.
Water insecurity only deepens our reliance on the manufactured “savior” to these crises: plastic packaged water. When the ability of water systems to do proper maintenance and infrastructure improvement is undermined, and communities can’t reliably access or trust safe water coming from the tap, they often turn to or are pushed onto bottled water.
Nearly 90% of Americans consume some bottled water, and 20% consume only bottled water. Bottled water is big business; in fact, it’s the most consumed beverage in the U.S. and worldwide. Globally, more than 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute, and around 600 billion plastic bottles are produced every year. The global revenue of bottled water is projected to surge to $509.18 billion by 2030, up from $372.70 billion in 2025. The U.S. contributes the largest share of this market.
Central to the bottled water industry’s profiteering is fear mongering about tap water.
Despite having some of the overall highest quality tap water in the world, disinvestment in public drinking water infrastructure and deregulation has led some U.S. communities to have valid concerns about the safety of their public water. Over 9.2 million households still have toxic lead pipes bringing water to their taps, and nearly half of the U.S. has PFAS contaminating their water. These crises, as well as other safe drinking water violations, disproportionately occur in low-income, rural, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
But the plastic bottled water industry explicitly targets these communities with advertisement campaigns and exploits drinking water crises for profit by mythologizing their product as a “safe solution” as opposed to the regrettable replacement it is in many circumstances.
First myth: bottled water is the safer, purer option.
Bottled water does not face the same health standards as tap water. Companies are required to test their water quality far less frequently than public water systems. And while public water systems always have to notify the public when there is a drinking water violation, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates bottled water as a food product, does not have this same requirement to inform consumers about contamination and recalls. Staff cuts at the FDA threaten to further weaken the enforcement of bottled water regulations.
Moreover, nearly two-thirds of plastic bottled water is repackaged tap water. The plastic bottles then add to that water toxic chemicals that can leach from the bottle itself, including PFAS and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It should come as no surprise that the amount of microplastics in bottled water is far higher than in tap water.
Second myth: Bottled water is inexpensive.
Bottled water is not affordable, costing households hundreds to thousands of times more per year than tap water, and further entrenching wealth disparities. In emergencies, municipalities and residents seeking an alternative water supply are often subject to price gouging for plastic bottles. Low-income communities with poor infrastructure are the least trusting of tap water and most reliant on bottled, paying more for an inferior commodity than wealthier households pay for a safe tap. Budget cuts will deepen water insecurity and lead more people to bottled water use.
Third myth: bottled water is sustainable and recyclable.
Ninety-nine percent of plastics are made from fossil fuels, plunging the planet deeper into the climate crisis. Communities on the frontlines and fencelines of fossil fuel extraction, plastic production, and landfill and incineration sites are recurrently exposed to highly toxic chemicals and polluted air, soil, and water. Plastic production itself requires a massive amount of water, both for the extraction of oil and for the cooling of plastic pellets. And bottlers are drying up local groundwater resources. Overall, an estimated 2,000 times more energy is needed to produce bottled water than to supply tap water.
And those bottles never go away. Municipalities have to pay massive sums to deal with plastic bottle pollution and the few bottles that are reclaimed. Plastic bottles most often end up in landfills or incinerators, are shipped overseas under the guise of “recycling” only to be dumped and open-burned, leading to further serious pollution, injustice, and greenhouse gas emissions. In all cases, plastic bottles—like all plastics—break up into micro- and nanoplastics, polluting our bodies and environment.
The bottled water industry is undermining safe public drinking water infrastructure and investment everywhere. According to 2016 estimates, it would take less than half of global annual bottled water sales to ensure safe drinking water supply across the world.
Federal cuts to drinking water programs and regulations will further erode trust in tap water, worsening water inequity and the plastic pollution crisis. It is critical that funding be redirected into public drinking water systems, away from corporate handouts and privatization of our precious freshwater resources.
Call your senators and representatives to oppose these proposed cuts to drinking water infrastructure and ensure the human right to public, safe water is protected.
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As Federal Leaders Are Failing on PFAS, States Must Step up—Here’s How
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action.
May 31, 2025
The Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back critical protections that ensure safe drinking water. These regulations help ensure that our water is free of PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” an especially hazardous form of industrial chemicals that linger in the environment indefinitely.
PFAS are damaging to human health at even the lowest doses. Exposure to PFAS can contribute to serious illnesses including kidney cancer, liver disease, thyroid disorders, or autoimmune disorders. There are no current treatments to remove PFAS from the body.
Despite the evidence of these dire health risks, the administration is shirking their responsibility to protect people across the country from PFAS exposure.
At the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Now, it is more urgent than ever for state and local leaders to step up, fill this gap, and protect their communities from PFAS exposure. It’s a massive undertaking, but fortunately, there is a clear path forward.
Advocates and experts across the country have already begun to chart the way—because they’ve had to. Even though prior PFAS regulations were important, they’ve never been enough to fully protect our water, our land, or our bodies from pollution.
I encourage leaders to look to Maine as a model to follow: Maine has emerged as a national leader in addressing PFAS contamination through comprehensive state-level initiatives that demonstrate the urgent need for federal action. We're the first state to require manufacturers to report intentionally added forever chemicals in products. Perhaps most significantly, the state is working toward the elimination of PFAS from consumer products, addressing the problem at its source rather than merely managing its consequences. Maine's regulatory approach has implemented some of the nation's most protective drinking water standards for PFAS compounds, recognizing that even minute concentrations pose serious health risks.
My own work in Maine has focused on advancing programs to monitor, test, and limit PFAS in our water and food supply. Over the years, we’ve realized that establishing strong drinking water standards is just the beginning of ridding our communities of PFAS. Now, we’re tackling contamination in the food supply by working with farmers to test their land and crops and make the technical changes necessary to produce safe crops and livestock.
Our state's PFAS Advisory Fund provides critical support to farmers whose agricultural operations have been devastated by PFAS contamination, primarily through the historical application of contaminated biosolids to farmland. Complementing this effort, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) established their PFAS Emergency Relief Fund to offer direct assistance to organic producers facing immediate financial hardship from crop losses and farm closures due to contamination.
Maine has also taken the bold step of banning the land application of sludge, eliminating a primary pathway for PFAS contamination of agricultural soils.
These comprehensive regulations serve multiple critical purposes: protecting the health of farmers who work the land and face direct exposure to contaminated soils, safeguarding consumers with safe food, and preserving our most treasured and irreplaceable resources—soil and water.
I urge more local leaders to champion these initiatives with your own representatives. Every town and state has a unique political landscape, and some of these programs might not advance easily. We need new innovation and lots of legwork to develop and advance the right solutions for everyone. But at the end of the day, we should all be able to agree that the health and safety of our communities starts with clean water and safe food, and make this work a priority.
Where the federal government won’t protect us, we will take action ourselves—by raising awareness, pushing for strong state-level responses, and stopping PFAS contamination before it causes further harm.
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