Brent Kearney

I recently watched a powerful film named Flow: for the love of water, and I highly recommend that you see it. You may never buy bottled water again. Here is the official trailer:

A brief part of the film, near the beginning, discussed the presence of atrazine in water. Especially in North America, where it is used as herbicide on corn farms, and travels up to 6000km via rain. Because it causes prostate and breast cancer, and has destructive environmental effects such as chemically castrating fish and amphibians, it’s use is banned in Europe. However, it is still widely used in the USA and in Canada.

According to the film, there is less regulation of bottled water than there is for tap water. Independent testing of over a thousand bottles and hundreds of brands of bottled water revealed high levels arsenic, organic chemicals, and bacteria. Just because there is a photo of a mountain stream on the label doesn’t mean that it wasn’t pumped out of an industrial parking lot!

The film is not all doom and gloom, though. It highlights progress by several communities banning together to implement new technologies or old traditions to create sustainable water management in their area. The film’s website is also the central part of a social movement to have the right to clean water declared as a basic human right by the United Nations:

Article 31:
Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.

I signed the petition today. You should too.