There’s something awful about every step of the bottled water process.
They encourage distrust of tap water, even though that’s essentially what they are selling us.
“Purity” and “Health” Marketing water as a health product is just…dense.
“When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” — Susan D. Wellington Not only are companies explicitly targeting health and weight-conscious young women, they’re also targeting parents and their children.
They’re not subtle at all: the aim is to make us pay a premium for water, which is a human right.
Actual quote: “When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” — Susan D. Wellington, former President of Quaker Oats Co.’s U.S. Beverage Division (later acquired by PepsiCo).
Latin-American immigrants, particularly mothers.
The angle is this: despite admitting that tap water is much cheaper and usually safer, corporations like Nestlé market bottled water as part of the immigrant “heritage” of coming from places with less access to clean drinking water.
They are potentially making them sick and targeting people of color and low-income communities — people who are already subjected to systematic oppression in so many other ways.
Clean, safe drinking water is a human right.

In its new report "Take Back the Tap," Food and Water Watch researchers look at the booming business of bottled water, which surpassed soda in sales in 2016.
The group finds nearly 64 percent of bottled water comes from municipal taps and that it cost almost 2,000 times as much as tap water and four times as much as gasoline.
Patty Lovera, food and water policy director with Food and Water Watch, says bottled water companies target demographics through advertising, especially immigrant communities.
"It is much more the norm in other countries where you have to go buy bottled water because the safety systems aren’t there for tap water,” says Lovera.
“That’s not the case in most American cities.
That’s pretty predatory to convince people they need to keep spending their hard earned money to do that and undermining people’s confidence in tap water."
Activists also have raised concerns that companies that do rely on groundwater are depleting people’s local water supplies and hurting the ecosystem.
In 2016, people in Cascade Locks voted to ban large bottling facilities.
"The governor weighed in and basically blocked a fairly complicated deal that would have let Nestle do a water transfer to get access to build a water facility in the Columbia River Gorge,” she says.
But she adds that it can be difficult to get support for this idea.

There’s something awful about every step of the bottled water process.
They encourage distrust of tap water, even though that’s essentially what they are selling us.
Read our full report here.
“Purity” and “Health” Marketing water as a health product is just…dense.
“When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” — Susan D. Wellington Not only are companies explicitly targeting health and weight-conscious young women, they’re also targeting parents and their children.
They’re not subtle at all: the aim is to make us pay a premium for water, which is a human right.
Actual quote: “When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” — Susan D. Wellington, former President of Quaker Oats Co.’s U.S. Beverage Division (later acquired by PepsiCo).
The angle is this: despite admitting that tap water is much cheaper and usually safer, corporations like Nestlé market bottled water as part of the immigrant “heritage” of coming from places with less access to clean drinking water.
They are potentially making them sick and targeting people of color and low-income communities — people who are already subjected to systematic oppression in so many other ways.
Clean, safe drinking water is a human right.

In science news this week: Delta Independent Science Board’s final review of EcoRestore’s adaptive management program; Looks are deceiving for ‘scary looking’ lamprey; Acoustic fish tags document predation; Sea-level rise and the governance gap in the San Francisco Bay Area; Caspian push and pull; US FWS looking for volunteers to help save future generations of seabirds; and more … Delta Independent Science Board’s final review of EcoRestore’s adaptive management program: “The “EcoRestore Adaptive Management Program White Paper, v3/7/2017” (White Paper) improves the prospects for managing Delta restoration projects adaptively.
… ” Read more from the US FWS here: Looks are deceiving for ‘scary looking’ lamprey Acoustic fish tags document predation: “Not only can predatory fish take a bite out of salmon populations, they can also mess with studies of fish survival.
Tagging and tracking fish with acoustic tags is an important method for understanding how young salmon move and survive.
However, this depends on a critical assumption: that the acoustic tag only represents the movement of the tagged fish, and not a predator that has consumed it (Gibson et al. 2015).
Once a tagged fish is eaten, its tag may still transmit data on the movement of the predator fish, which can skew survival estimates and lead to false conclusions.
… ” Read more from the FishBio blog here: Acoustic fish tags document predation Sea-level rise and the governance gap in the San Francisco Bay Area: “Most San Francisco Bay Area policymakers understand that sea-level rise is a serious threat to the region, agree that preparing for it should be a priority, and have a basic understanding of solutions that would help the region adapt to sea-level rise, such as wetlands, living shorelines, seawalls and levees.
… ” Read more from the US FWS here: Join us: Help save future generations of seabirds Flood plan boosts floodplain: “When the Central Valley Flood Protection Board adopts the 2017 Update to its Flood Protection Plan later this summer it be another twist in the serpentine evolution of California’s approach to flood management.
… ” Read more from Estuary News here: LA drainage goes native Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
Maven’s XKCD Comic Pick of the Week … Sign up for daily email service and you’ll never miss a post!
About Science News and Reports: This weekly feature, posted every Thursday, is a collection of the latest scientific research and reports with a focus on relevant issues to the Delta and to California water, although other issues such as climate change are sometimes included.

What satellites can tell us about how animals will fare in a changing climate.
The presenters discussed how changes in Arctic sea ice cover have helped scientists predict a 30 percent drop in the global population of polar bears over the next 35 years.
"When we look forward several decades, climate models predict such profound loss of Arctic sea ice that there’s little doubt this will negatively affect polar bears throughout much of their range, because of their critical dependence on sea ice," said Kristin Laidre, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center in Seattle and co-author of a study on projections of the global polar bear population.
He found that there is a very strong relationship between plant productivity and deer and mountain lion density.
For mountain lions, it’s even worse," Stoner said.
Using maps of vegetation productivity during a severe drought that occurred in the southwestern United States in 2002, Stoner modeled what would be the deer and mountain lion distribution and abundance, should extreme drought become the norm.
"Using measurements of vegetation stressed by drought, our model predicted a 22 percent decrease in deer density.
For mountain lions, the decline was 43 percent.
Petrov examined historical data going back to 1969 and determined that there are ongoing changes in the distribution and migration patterns of the wild reindeer due to climate change and human pressure.
"Taimyr reindeer now have to travel longer distances between their winter and summer grounds, and this is causing a higher calf mortality," Petrov said.

In America’s Cup Waters, a Robot Takes On an Invasion of Lionfish.
The America’s Cup is a technology race as much as a sailboat race.
The British America’s Cup team, Land Rover BAR, and its sustainability sponsor, 11th Hour Racing, are intent on leaving a legacy in Bermuda and have made the lionfish a priority.
Ben Ainslie, Land Rover BAR’s founder and skipper, has made sustainability part of the conversation in this edition of the Cup.
“It’s something they are really, really concerned about.” This week, a small group of scientists and conservationists, with the financial and promotional help of Land Rover BAR, is deploying a robot prototype in Bermuda designed to stun and capture lionfish at depths that human divers rarely reach.
“It’s an inventive way to try and tackle this issue,” Ainslie said in an interview on Saturday.
“I’m sure it’s going to get developed over time, and I’m sure they’ll make it work.” The robot is the brainchild of a new organization, Robots in Service of the Environment, which was founded in 2015 by Colin Angle and his wife, Erika.
“Here’s a very beautiful creature we can capture and make a positive impact.” The lionfish is increasingly on the menu in restaurants in the United States and the Caribbean, but Ruiz said there was not yet a supply large or consistent enough to create a reliable market.
The robot is being developed by a team of volunteers, including biologists, that is working out of the Boston garage of John Rizzi, RSE’s executive director.
But instead of looking for an I.P.O., we are looking just to raise enough funding for us to get robots out there to make an impact.” The robot is about three and a half feet long and about 20 pounds, Hoffman said.

PORTLAND — The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act, introduced April 8 by U.S. Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR), aims to “clear up inefficiencies and red tape to allow more effective management of alarming predation levels by California sea lions on Columbia River spring Chinook and other species.” If approved by Congress and the president, the legislation will authorize states and tribes to remove a limited number of predatory sea lions.
It allows active management of the growing Columbia River sea lion population and removes a requirement that individual sea lions be identified as preying on salmon before they can be removed.
So while there are management efforts to reduce pinniped predation in the vicinity of Bonneville Dam, this management effort is insufficient to reduce the severity of the threat, especially pinniped predation in the Columbia River estuary (river miles 1 to 145) and at Willamette Falls.” A limited removal program has been in effect since 2011 but the NMFS review concluded that the current program doesn’t do enough to protect endangered salmon.
This represents a 5.8 percent loss of the 2016 spring Chinook run a quarter mile of Bonneville Dam alone.
NOAA Fisheries Service also estimates that up to 45 percent of the 2014 spring Chinook run was potentially lost to sea lions in the 145 river miles between the estuary and Bonneville Dam.
Tribal leaders have expressed support for a key provision in the bill that would provide the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce tribes with access to the same authority currently available only to states.
Those who suggest that this — sea lions eating fish near Bonneville Dam — is a natural phenomenon are not familiar with either the normal habitat of sea lions or the hard-fought compromises that so many in the Columbia Basin have reached in order to try and have a productive fishery,” the Yakama said.
“Our tribes are working hard to restore ecological balance to a highly altered and degraded river system.
“The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act honors the underlying intent of both laws while providing professional fisheries managers with tools to manage both protected and endangered species.” Sea lion populations have seen resurgence under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
In 1972 when the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed, the California sea lion population hovered around 30,000 animals.