The recession may be finishing what environmentalists started a few years ago: the end of the bottled-water fad. Twice in the past week I have been in restaurants that just a year ago would have been pushing still or sparkling water at their patrons from the moment they sat down. This time the waiters said merely: "Tap water OK?" When low-margin businesses like restaurants start passing on juicy profit centers-in this case, the chance to charge premium prices for a cheap commodity-you know something dramatic has happened. The rise and fall of bottled water may be the best case study yet in the strange politics of trendy environmental causes.

Bottled water got its foothold in the U.S. as a statement about healthy living. The 1980s craze for sweating at the gym launched a durable fad for toting around bottles of mountain spring water. To drink something so natural was to be "Fit on the Inside"-in the words of an ad campaign that nicely captured the soul-craft of the treadmill set.

But even without the example set by aerobicizers, the popularity of bottled water had a push. Go back to the mid-'90s, when the trend was booming, and one finds a steady drip-drip of frightful tap-scares. Perhaps no one did more to promote the bottled water craze than the Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based activist organization that issued report after breathless report about the lethal dangers spewing from American taps. There were the 1995 studies alleging that 1,000 Americans a year were dying from tainted municipal water, with an extra 400,000 sickened by faucet-flowing pathogens. In 1997 came the alarm that some 245 Midwest towns were serving up a toxic cocktail of HO and weed killer. In 2001 it was rocket fuel in California aquifers. In 2002 the group warned that the chlorine used to disinfect tap water led to "a health risk for pregnant women."

Faced with this drumbeat of doom, consumers might be forgiven for having taken to the bottle. How else were they to quaff the 64 ounces of water a day they had been told was essential to health? For a little while, carrying a bottle of water was the very symbol of fashionable health-consciousness. But fashions change: Now bottled water is the eco-equivalent of last year's frock. And so none other than the Environmental Working Group was on Capitol Hill last month mounting a full-throated campaign against the stuff. The thrust was that, hey, if you run tap water through a filter, it isn't really so bad after all-and quite the bargain too!

Environmentalists complain of all the energy wasted shipping and trucking bottled water around, but their most ardent scorn is reserved for the bottles themselves. Once upon a time plastic bottles made from lightweight polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, were an innovation meant to be relatively friendly to the planet. They could be stomped into thin discs, crushed by hand or even rolled up like toothpaste tubes, thus taking up a small space in landfills. Now they are seen as bad in every way, choking the rising oceans and poisoning our precious bodily fluids with leaching carcinogens （an idea promulgated by such august academic journals as the Proceedings of the Society of Anonymous Chain Emails）.

The trendy disdain for plastic bottles has produced a new fad for reusable containers. Helping to shame the sinners is Sigg, a Swiss manufacturer of stylish little metal jugs. The bottles are available with eco-slogans such as "Make Love Not Landfill," "Rise Above Plastic" and "Green Is the New Black." Or how's this for pushy: "Friends don't let friends drink from plastic." （In my book, friends don't bully friends over the water they drink.）

And so an innocent choice consumers were urged to feel good about comes to be fraught with moral peril. Part of the appeal of bottled water, after all, was that you didn't have to plan ahead by filling a canteen. It was available at a moment's notice, purchased at a bodega or wrangled from a vending machine. It could stand as a healthy alternative to soda, packaged attractively enough to lure consumers who would otherwise be seduced by caramel-colored fructose bombs.

It wasn't that long ago that making water available everywhere was itself a sort of crusade. In 2005 the American Beverage Association urged its members to stop selling sugary drinks in schools. A year later the Clinton Foundation, acting on the former president's preoccupation with weighty issues, persuaded Coke and Pepsi to phase out their signature products from campus vending machines, replacing the siren-song of soda with pure, healthful water and juice for kids. But now schools such as Washington University in St. Louis have made "Ban the Bottle" a campus cry. Thus does one crusade lead to another, with the solution to yesterday's crisis providing the stuff of today's.

当流行风尚遇上易变的不安

几年前由环保主义者引起的经济衰退也许正在结束：瓶装纯净水流行的终结。我在过去的一周中曾两次去过一些饭店，就在一年以前只要是饭店的老主顾刚一入座他们就会马上端来软饮料或碳酸饮料。然而现在服务生则仅仅会说："白水可以吗？"当一些像饭店这样的低利润商家开始转嫁多利润中心时--在这种情况下，有机会调高低端商品的价格--你就会知道一些戏剧性的事情发生了。瓶装水的多少也许是研究现代环保主义者的政见的最佳方式。

瓶装纯净水作为健康生活的象征在美国曾有稳固的地位。在十九世纪八十年代兴起了一种穿可以携带用来装山泉水的瓶子的结实耐用的运动衣风潮。喝天然水那时象征了"内在的健康"--这是一个广告语，它曾成功地俘获了每天从事单调繁重工作的人们的心。

然而就算没有有氧运动者的榜样宣传，矿泉水的普及也得到了推进。回顾九十年代中期，当时风潮正起，有人出现了一种持续的同时很严重的恐自来水症。也许没有人比环境保护主义组织为宣传瓶装纯净水做的工作再多了，一家华盛顿的积进组织曾报道说在美国喝自来水有发生剧烈呕吐的致命的危险。1995年，调查研究显示1000名美国人死于喝了受污染的城市水，另有400000人由于饮用自来水生病。1997年，近245个中西部城市中的鸡尾酒含有类似于HO和除草剂的有毒物质。2001年，查出加州的居民用水中含有石油杂质。2002年，有关团体就抗议说用氯来净化自来水将会导致"对孕妇生命健康的极大威胁".

面对这样恐怖的事实，消费者们也许就会不介意饮用瓶装纯净水了。毕竟他们还能通过什么方式来一天畅饮64盎司的健康必需品--水呢？有那么一阵，带一瓶矿泉水是时尚的健康理念的象征。但是流行会变的：现在，瓶装纯净水已经是过时的环保等效物了。因而环境保护组织上个月在Capitol Hill组织了一场全面的有计划的反对运动。它的标语是，嘿，如果你用过滤器来净化自来水的话，真的不是那么糟，而且它还很合算！

环保者抱怨太多能源浪费在运输瓶装水上，但是他们最嗤之以鼻的是瓶子材料本身。很久以前用聚乙烯做成的塑料瓶被认为是保护地球的重大创新。它们可以被踩成扁片儿，或像牙膏管一样被搓成一团，从而掩埋的时候只占一点小地方。现在，它们在所有方面都被认为是有害的，它们阻碍了植物的生长，其含有的致癌物质毒害了我们体内的珍贵的循环机制（这一观点权威学术杂志所公布）.

反对塑料瓶的热潮衍生了新的可再利用容器的流行。使罪人丢脸的人是圣人，语自一位瑞士小型时尚金属制品壶制作商。有关瓶子的公益广告随处可见，就像，"做爱，不填埋（?）""远离塑料"以及"绿色是新的黑色"或者这个新鲜的广告怎么样："朋友 不要让你的朋友用塑料制品喝水。"（在我看来就是，朋友不要用他们喝的水来威胁朋友）

因此无辜的消费者们曾被极力鼓吹而觉得不错的选择正在演变成一种忧虑，这本身就是在精神上的和自己过不去。瓶装水的一部分吸引力就是，你不需要把费劲地去填满器具柜。这在当时的宣传中是随处可见的，购买还是同自动贩卖机争论。它可以作为就像是关于苏打水，被包装的足够吸引那些有可能被焦糖颜色的瓶子吸引的消费者的健康选择机制。

使水随处可见并不是很久以前的一场运动。在2005年美国饮料协会就提倡它的成员们停止在校园贩卖含糖饮料。一年之后克林顿基金会，针对前总统关注的重要事项，劝说可口可乐和百事重新设计校园贩卖机上它们产品的标示，为了孩子，用纯净的、健康的水和果汁来代替有害的苏打。然而现在的学校，像圣路易斯的华盛顿大学已经推出了"禁止瓶子"的校园号召。因此，从一个运动到另一个运动，伴随着过去危机的解决与现在新事物的产生。