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A quaint Australian village found itself in the global glare last week after it banished bottled water from its supermarket shelves. The residents of Bundanoon, a little tourist town south of Sydney, launched the “Bundy on Tap” campaign after “a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer,” according to the New York Times.

The locals questioned the logic “of trucking water some 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, north to a plant in Sydney, only to transport it somewhere else — possibly even back to Bundanoon — for sale.” One Bundy on Tap campaign leader told the Times:

We became aware, as a community, of what the bottled water industry was all about. . .So the idea was floated that if we don’t want an extraction plant in our town, maybe we shouldn’t be selling the end product at all.

The Bundy On Tap campaign unintentionally unleashed “a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water,” but here at home, not everyone gets what all the fuss is about. At a House subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill last Wednesday, legislators who lobbied for better regulation of the bottled water industry–which, contrary to public perception, is generally held to a lower standard than tap water–were greeted with much skepticism.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a dismissive, derisive column about the effort to impose higher standards on bottled water :

The nation is entangled in two wars, a deep recession and a flu pandemic, and the people’s representatives are hard at work investigating the menace of . . . bottled water?

He went on to mock Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who spearheaded the investigation:

Stupak had found the enemy, and it is Evian. And Poland Spring, and Aquafina and the rest. He even banished from the hearing room the bottles of Deer Park that are usually provided for members and witnesses, in favor of pitchers of iced tap water.

But is it true about this liquid scourge? Or is the chairman all wet? This much is clear, crisp and refreshing: Bottled water has not killed anybody, and it’s not even clear that it has made anybody sick.

Tell that to Milbank’s colleague, Nicholas Kristof, over at The New York Times, whose column today noted that both bottled and tap water can be contaminated by phthalates, those endocrine-disrupting chemicals that may be fueling a rise in obesity, autism, allergies, and genital deformities in both humans and animals. Phthalate levels “soar in certain plastic water bottles,” according to Kristof.

Bottled water offers the illusion of purity, and it’s proven to be a tremendously successful marketing ploy, preying on our fears that our tap water isn’t safe. And, unfortunately, while tap water is, in fact, more strictly regulated than bottled, it’s got its own dirty laundry list of potential contaminants.

We like to think that the lack of clean, safe drinking water is a problem primarily for underdeveloped nations, but we’ve got plenty of water woes right here at home, including (but not limited to): rivers and streams clogged with toxic debris from mountain top mining removal; mercury emissions from coal-powered plants; pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, and antibiotics from industrial agriculture; and the residue of the prescription drugs we gobble like M&M’s to cure all our self-inflicted modern maladies.

It’s no wonder so many consumers are afraid to drink the water coming out of their taps. And even those of us who’ve ditched the single-use bottles in favor of a reusable metal bottle can find it hard to get a refill when we’re out and about: drinking fountains have been largely been displaced by private vending machines in many places, including many public spaces. This failure to provide the public with a reliable, free source of water only strengthens the beverage industry’s hand in its drive to privatize one of life’s essentials.

You can argue, as Milbank does, that we face far more pressing problems than a misguided consumer preference for bottled water over tap, or our government’s failure to sufficiently safeguard either one. But in many parts of the world, access to safe drinking water is, in fact, a matter of life or death. As Elizabeth Royte, author of
 Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water, blogged the other day, 13,699 people a day die from preventable, water-related diseases in this world.

People the world over should have the right to safe, clean drinking water, whether they live in West Virginia or South Africa. We can’t allow our government to neglect our municipal water supply and encourage the privatization of water by enabling multinational corporations to drain our aquifers and perpetuate the myth that bottled water is safer than tap.

The reality is that neither one is safe enough, and we have to demand better. As Kristof concludes:

If terrorists were putting phthalates in our drinking water, we would be galvanized to defend ourselves and to spend billions of dollars to ensure our safety.

It may sound absurd to suggest that we should fear Aquafina more than Al Qaeda, but if we don’t clean up our act and defend our municipal water as a public good and a human right, we’ll continue to do the terrorists’ dirty work for them. Wouldn’t you rather wash your hands of all that? Find out more about how you can help take back the tap at Food & Water Watch.