Wellsprings: a natural history of bottled water Francis Chapelle

Wellsprings: a natural history of bottled water  Francis Chapelle

Warning – there is another book – Wellsprings a book of spiritual exercises – that is not the book I am reviewing.  This book is another of the books I have been reading to learn more about fresh water.

I have so much trouble with the amount of plastic that is being consumed for bottled water that I would not have thought I could enjoy a book devoted to exploring the industry of spring water and bottled water, but this book was excellent and in depth with some great stories.

Here are stories of Sartoga Springs in the NE and its near namesake Calistoga Springs in CA.  There are stories of the aquifers of the great plains, the abundance of springs in Florida, and the connections between erosion, weather patterns, mountains, plains, folded rocks, etc.

There is a connection between springs in Europe that were used for healing.  They did not know the reasons that these springs helped, but it was the chemicals that were dissolved in to the waters that made individual springs have different impacts on a variety of ailments.  And this in fact became the first true medicinal prescription – something accidental and not understood, but never-the-less effective.  For example, “In nineteenth-century Europe, chlorosis was a fairly common condition among young women beginning the rigors of puberty.” One of the symptoms was “a slight greenish tint of the skin.”  This is an anemia, iron deficiency that was cleared up by iron rich waters.

And that led to the spas and the baths and impacted not only health but society.  There are terrible stories of well waters polluted by the lack of septic systems and a slow learning process to understand the microorganisms that poisoned the waters and made people sick.  There were heroes who fought the ignorance and they often suffered the ridicule of the “learned” who, like today, felt threatened by new science and knowledge.  Dr. Snow began recording the locations of Cholera outbreaks and his records took the site to a pump that was used by the local inhabitants for their drinking water, but his findings were rejected until later when.  Robert Koch, microbiologist, figured out the cause of cholera, and we finally began to understand that microorganisms were a danger to our health. 

The problem is in finding the culprits – “…we human beings actually have more bacterial cells living in and on us then the eukaryotic cells we are actually made of.”    Cryptosporidium infected the city water of Milwaukee as a late as 1993 and 40,000 people came down with an intestinal ailment.  It is issues like this that have followed human civilization and often caused a distrust of water.

“Like all Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Pilgrims disliked, distrusted, and despised drinking water.  Only truly poor people who had absolutely no choice, drank water.”  The rest drank beer.

In 1903, the same year as the Wright brothers flight, Michael Owens developed an automated bottle making machine.  Of course that has led to many issues such as – who owns the water? 

Through the book you will learn that there had been a previous boom for bottled water that was shut off when water supplies began to use chlorine to disinfect urban supplies (1913).  Poland Springs Maine began in 1844 and Mountain Valley Spring waters from Hot Springs Arkansas (1871).

“By the time the Romans conquered Britain in 50 A.D., both the Roman and Briton cultures had a long history of revering water, wells and springs.  Springs and wells were considered to be inhabited by spirits…”

The only weakness is that the author repeats a few key ideas regularly as though the reader might not remember and make the connection.  This should not stop you from reading and learning.

Now the small springs keep getting purchased by the giants like Perrier and Danone and Suntory as the struggle to compete with Coca Cola and Pepsi – both of which sell you bottled municipal water – Dasoni and Aquafina.