These are dark days for Big Water.

America is finally waking up to the observation comedian Dennis Miller made so many years ago: that only in America could a company make money selling something that falls for for free from the sky.

Leave it to an economic cataclysm to make us re-assess some of our assumptions.

With the perfect storm of a faltering economy, concern for the environment and consumers increasingly questioning the assumption of health that was the foundation of the bottled water business, Big Water is worried.

If you need proof (and why would you? Have I ever lied to you?) take a look at this article from The Miami Herald.

It seems that Miami-Dade had the gall to run a series of advertisements telling people how great the water coming out of their tap really is.

(Quality aside, South Florida is being developed in such an unsustainable way that eventually, it will not have enough of this water to supply its population. A recent notice from the South Florida Water Management District, announced plans for year-round conservation rules to be enacted in an effort to save water. But that's not what we're here to talk about today.)

And while everything the radios ads said is true, that public water is generally cheaper, safer and purer, the Nestle Waters North American company decided it was time for their lawyers to get involved.

In a legal action that they made sure to call The Miami Herald about, Nestle argued that promoting public water was "an attack on the integrity of the company."

Folks around here will remember Nestle as the company that raised a fuss with its plans to sink wells all over Chester County to re-sell in a bottle.

Pottstown residents may also remember them as the company that donated palette upon palette of bottled water to the borough when the boil water alert hit town three or four years ago.

But people in Miami may remember them as the company that threatened to sue them over false advertising claims.

If this seems a little desperate to you (and it does to me), that's because Big Water has reason to be desperate.

Just two days ago, The Mercury ran an Associated Press story in its business section about Pepsi-Cola cutting 3,300 jobs.

The story talked about how the economy was affecting the company and stock shares, but the crux was near the end. Buried at the bottom of the AP story was this sentence: "Bottled water sales volume slid by double-digits as consumers drank more tap water."

Given that this was the company's focus because of an earlier (and sustained) drop in the carbonated soda market and you can start to see why suing your way to profitability starts to look like a good strategy.

By contrast, The New York Times story on the same announcement put the drop in bottled water sales right on top, which is where (I think) it belongs.

An analyst the Times interviewed "found that 34 percent of consumers say they are reusing plastic bottles more often and 23 percent say they are cutting back on bottled beverages in favor of tap water or beverages in containers that create less waste."

Another firm found that water filter sales, the kind you attach to your tap, were up 16 percent in the first half of this year. Yikes!

"Volume for noncarbonated beverage sales dropped 5 percent in the quarter, led by double-digit declines in Aquafina and Propel, a flavored and vitamin-enhanced water drink," the Times reported.

The dirtly little secret of the bottled water industry is that much of the bottled water marketed with pictures of mountains, clear streams or wild animals, actually comes from the very taps people buy the product in the hopes of avoiding.

As we reported in my Mercury series on water issues, "Ebb & Flow" (kindly preserved on the Web by the Green Valleys Association, but regrettably not to be found on The Mercury's own Web site), as much as 40 percent of bottled water is actually bottled tap water, sometimes with added treatment, sometimes not.”

Aquafina, the number one bottled water brand, made by Pepsi-Cola, comes from municipal sources like Wichita, Kan., while Dasani comes from sources in Queens, N.Y. and Jacksonville, Fla.

In a 2001 blind taste test, the vast majority of people selected New York City tap water as tasting better than Evian and Poland Spring.

"Americans drank more than 9 billion gallons in 2007, and fewer than half of 228 brands of bottled water reveal their source. Typical cost is $3.79 per gallon, 1,900 times the cost of public tap water," the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

And then there's the final blow.

If not for taste, the one thing most consumers assume about their bottled water is that its purer or more safe than that nasty old tap water.

Not according to this Oct. 15 story in the Chronicle.

According to that paper, "the Environmental Working Group tested 10 brands of bottled water and found that Wal-Mart's Sam's Choice contained chemical levels that exceeded legal limits in California and the voluntary standards adopted by the industry.

"The tests discovered an average of eight contaminants in each brand. Four brands besides Wal-Mart's also were contaminated with bacteria.

"Our study was a snapshot of the marketplace. We found some brands that provided good quality and other brands that contained various chemical pollutants. What this shows is that consumers cannot have confidence. They don't know what they're getting," said a group spokeswoman.

The group also singled out Giant Supermarket's brand Acadia for excessive levels of disinfection byproducts, the newspaper reporter.

"Also present in bottled water were caffeine and the pharmaceutical Tylenol, as well as arsenic, radioactive isotopes, nitrates and ammonia from fertilizer residue. Industrial chemicals used as solvents, degreasing agents and propellants were also found in the tests," according to the newspapers.

The study also found trace amounts of synthetic chemicals or degradation products from the manufacture of PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, plastic bottles were found, including acetaldehyde, isobutane and toluene.

"The environmental group filed a notice of intent to sue Wal-Mart Tuesday, alleging that the mega-chain failed to warn the public of illegal concentrations of trihalomethanes, which are cancer-causing chemicals. "

Hmm, wonder how long it will take the marketing department to divert us away from that that?
The cynic in me says that they will just discontinue the brand, then bottle the same water with the same procedures under a different name and wait for someone to catch them again.
(Why is it that no matter what happens, the lawyers always make money?)

But if the lawsuits keep coming, pretty soon, people start asking themselves the question Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola dread: "Why am I paying 1,000 times more for something that may be more dangerous and less frequently tested that the water that comes out of my own tap for just pennies?"

Why indeed.

And answer is marketing and what we've been trained think and assume.

Considering all this, it's no wonder the ad campaign in Florida had Nestle running to their lawyers.

Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.

This Father's Day I am not in Pottstown.

Having written this ahead of time I am, as you read this, spending it with my father.
He lives in Sag Harbor, which is out on the northern side of the southern fork of Long Island. About as far out as you can get without spending Christmas in the Atlantic.

Like father like son, my dad is a writer.

However, he's braver than me. He eschewed a regular paycheck to live as a free-lancer, writing books and magazine articles for folks like American Heritage, Esquire, Connoisseur and, of course, The Atlantic.

He does not know how to blog and I doubt he'll read this one, which is just as well. He's not much for maudlin sentiment. I'm the mope in the family that tears up during "Extreme Makeover, Home Edition."

Father's Day is when we celebrate dads and, this being an environmental blog, I promise there is a green shade to this entry.

As a lad, my parents often took my sister and I on weekend hikes. OK, every weekend it wasn't raining and sometimes when it was. We considered them to be more in the line of a Bataan death march.

I will never forget my sister, about age 13, with a water-soaked handkerchief on her head to keep away the feasting mosquitoes swarming in the pine swamp we were hiking through, sitting down on a rock and refusing to go on. Hey, I never promised this trip down memory lane would be pretty.

I grew up north of New York City and the hikes were mostly in state parks in the area, everything from Sterling Forest to Fahnestock State Park to even a few in the Catskills.

Twice we drove across country and everywhere we stopped, there was a hike.

National Parks with names like Rocky Mountain, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Acadia, Mount Rainier, you name it, we hiked it.

At the time, my sister and I were not what you would call thrilled to be there. Like all kids, we were suspicious of anything our parents endorsed.

And, as with most kids, it was only as I got older that I realized the value of those experiences.

When you've seen eco-systems as varied as high desert, low desert, seaside, deciduous forest, conifer forest, the plants and animals that survive there and the adaptations they make to do it, you begin to appreciate the patterns of nature -- and to decry how humans tend to run roughshod over them.

You don't look at a desert as a wasteland. Just something different from what you know.

Not surprisingly, as someone who spent his childhood summers on Long Beach Island, my dad has always tended to drift toward the seashore, which is how he ended up on Long Island.

In fact one of his books is titled "The People Along the Sand."

In the preface to this book, my dad (Anthony Brandt for you Googlers out there) caught the nature of the beach in a way that I have adopted as my own.

He wrote: "An architect friend of mine describes the beach as not so much a place as the transcendence of place, a border between two realities, and another friend calls the people attracted to it, who feel they must live next to it or very close to it, edge people."

The changeable nature of the beach is what gives it its magic. When I visit, I picture myself living there year-round, yet can't shake the feeling that would be impossible, that I don't deserve it, that the beach would never stand for it.

His understanding of natural systems, fueled by his vast and insatiable reading habits, fostered an environmentalism in me based not soley on fervor and passion, although it did not forestall those attributes, but on understanding and practicality.

Don't save the forest just because you love it -- because you will never convince those who don't to join you -- save it because you and the people you are trying to convince need it. Explain to them why they do. Help them appreciate its value to them and then, often enough, they too will come to love it and thus help you preserve it.

By way of example, my dad helped me understand what many real estate agents do not; that in so many places, the beach is what geologists call "high speed real estate."

Eventually, the sea changes everything it touches.

"When I was a child a hurricane deposited a 35-foot power boat in our front yard in Brant Beach, New Jersey. You do not forget these things," he wrote.

He's right.

As I have not forgotten all those hikes and the quiet thrum of the Shawngunk forest audible only to those with the patience to listen for it; or the wind whistling across the twisted granite of Breakneck Ridge, my favorite mountain if only for its funky name and its unbelievable view of the Hudson Valley.

And yes, I remember those two-week stints, always in August, at my grandparents' tiny house at Brant Beach, with the outdoor shower, the splintery porch always in need of paint and breakfasts, the house now finally cool from the ever-present morning breeze, at a dining room table so big it seemed to me to have been salvaged from a schooner.

I remember the evening walks along the salt marsh on the bay side, and my parents pointing out the birds that lived there.

Each day there, I now realize, was a day stolen from some time in the future when the Atlantic steals away the sand that makes up Long Beach Island and decides haphazardly to deposit it somewhere inconvenient to us.

All of these experiences which he and my mother made possible, have shaped the way I see the natural world.

In fact I found I treasured them so that I have tried to duplicate some of them.
So, when my mother suggested a few years ago that my family and my sister's vacation together with her, I did not hesitate (despite the inherent inter-personal volubility of that oil and water mix) to agree and further, to suggest that the place we do it be at Long Beach Island, hoping to give my son, as my parents had, memories of a place on the edge.

Each year we can manage it financially, the more successfully we will have passed down an experience to a fourth generation, stubbornly struggling to further root a tradition in a place that is ultimately transitory by nature.

If nothing else, it may teach him what I learned during those hikes with my father, always striding inpatiently far ahead of us stragglers: How learning about those woods made it hard to watch the heavy hand of man fell them for yet another shopping center, much as is happening in West Pottsgrove right now.

I hope my son learns, as I did at my father's knee, to be watchful of what society too often foolishly throws away.

Having just finished covering what I roughly calculate to be my 30th high school graduation for The Mercury, I can tell you I have heard just about every cliche that can be earnestly uttered in those circumstances.

But something the Pottsgrove High School valedictorian said last Wednesday struck me through my indifference for its marvelous simplicity.

"We face our future with our past," Victoria Mitchell said.

And I realized it's true, of course.

Without those hikes, I would never have realized the truth of the fact that forests provides us an economic benefit by cleaning our water and the more we fell those trees for sub-divisions, the more expensive it will become to make clean water.

I would not have so readily believed the cooling power of trees as Pottstown debates the value of street trees.

And without those days at the beach -- or my own hurricane memory of the man paddling a flat boat down Farragut Avenue -- I might not have had the insight into how the economic benefits of over-development along barrier islands disappear when the inevitable hurricane flattens them. The storms are not necessarily worse, I realized, but there is certainly more there to destroy.

That past with which I face our increasingly uncertain future was shaped in large part by my father, and I just wanted to take the day to thank him for the strength it provides me. I urge you to do the same.

Happy Father's Day Dad, and thanks.